The robot "Pepper" speaks with visitors at the IBM stand at a technology trade fair (Credit: Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)
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The danger that artificial intelligence poses to the future of humanity grabs the headlines, but we ignore one of the most significant issues of the 21st century. It’s called the re-engineering of humankind.
“In the end, it’s not about intelligent machines taking over,” says Brett Frischmann, co-author of Re-Engineering Humanity. “I don’t really care about the engineering of artificial intelligence or really intelligent machines. I’m more concerned about the engineering of unintelligent humans.”
Like an episode of Black Mirror, the story that he and Evan Selinger tell in their rather dystopian book begins in small, seemingly insignificant ways.
When I try to login to a particular newspaper I am usually confronted by a picture of a roadside scene. Over the image is a grid. I am then challenged to prove that I am human by clicking on each box that contains parts of a crosswalk, which I complete with only a grumble, more about the Americanism rather than anything else. I don’t for one minute think about what the data I am generating is being used for. When I have done this, I am presented with a second picture. It’s only when this task has been completed that I can read the story that I am paying a fee every month to access.
Sound familiar? This challenge is, of course, a CAPTCHA. It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Ironically, the original Turing test was designed by British computer scientist Alan Turing to be administered by humans to robots as a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like behaviour. In the case of CAPTCHA, it is a machine that is testing a human’s ability to exhibit human like capabilities. In a sense it is testing the mechanisation of humans.
This automated stimulus-response test would be familiar to any psychologist who has watched rats scurry around a maze. At least the rats get a piece of cheese for their trouble.
The problem for us humans is that we don’t react in this automated manner only when faced by a CAPTCHA, but to a whole range of other software too. The automatic tick of a box – whether literal or metaphorical – becomes our default, predictable response when faced by choices where we should be paying more attention to the decisions we are making.
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