Shaming Bad Behaving AI Driverless Cars, And Their Makers

Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider

Old methods of public shaming are now being done via social media

Do you remember this childhood ditty: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never harm you. This famous children’s song dates back to the mid-1800s. That was a long time before the advent of today’s globally pervasive social media.

In our modern world, names can hurt you.

Indeed, as we enter into 2019, we are on the precipice of sticks and stones being thrown at AI overall, which I’ll provide as a use case the recent protestations about AI self-driving cars, along with “names” being lobbed at AI too. There are qualms being expressed on social media about AI replacing human workers and thus wiping out people’s livelihoods, there are concerns about how AI is undercutting our human rights of privacy, and there is the overarching name-calling that AI will possibly overtake our sense of freewill and ultimately enslave or wipe out humanity.

That’s quite a bit of name calling.

In the case of AI self-driving cars, the New York Times (NYT) ran an eye-catching headline-emboldened piece on December 31, 2018 about Arizonians that are apparently attacking self-driving cars. This is the old-fashioned sticks and stones approach as a form of protest.