AI — Boon or Curse?

There is a murderer on the prowl. What can help police in finding this person quickly is to use CCTV cameras in many places in the city, connect them to their command center and use face recognition to identify the person.

Would you stand by such a decision by the Police?

For argument’s sake, let’s say you do.

What happens when the Police use the same face recognition technology for other purposes such as to assist some politicians draw a vendetta against a citizen who questions their corruption practices?

Would you still stand by your decision of letting the Government or Government agencies use such powerful technology?

This is not a hypothetical scenario. These are ethical and moral dilemmas faced by Government agencies and the citizenry almost on a daily basis.

Countries like China have perpetrated laws that allow them to scan citizens’ faces and use them for whatever purposes they want, whether it be the social ranking of citizens or nabbing thieves or tracking political rivals, etc.

We are not talking about dilemma with a near-autocratic government like China. It is a dilemma in many other countries because of the conflict between free speech & free will versus a big brother king of monitoring by the Governments.

Now, the European Parliament is proposing tough measures against the unethical use of Artificial Intelligence technologies like face recognition or predictive policing and wants AI product manufacturers to declare if they have used any copyrighted material to train their AI models.

Once the European Parliament has agreed on its position, the member states, the European Commission, and MEPs will together draft a final bill and pass the law before the end of the current Parliament term in 2024.

Ultimately, AI is neither a boon nor a curse. It is how we use it, that shapes such an opinion.

This law can be a precedent for many other countries like India to adopt — whether good or bad depends on how the law comes out in its final form and shape.