AI and the guy who looked for food in trash bins

by yaobin.wen

A couple weeks ago, I was in Boston with my wife. We were sitting in the bright dining area of Hynes Convention Center and chatting with her friend. Then I noticed a man. At the first glance, he didn’t look like a homeless person because his clothes weren’t that shabby as a lot of other homeless people I see on the streets. He surely didn’t look like a shopper either: his clothes weren’t as nice as the other joyful shoppers either and he was not carrying any shopping bags. He stopped by two trash bins not far away from our table and looked into them. He then picked up a box of leftover food that someone threw away earlier, found a spoon from the same trash bin, sat down at the counter nearby, and slowly ate the food. It was a moderate amount of leftover food, which means it was more than needed by the previous eater. Then he looked into the trash bins again but didn’t find anymore. So he walked away.

He was quiet during the entire time: Quietly came by, quietly picked up the food and the spoon, quietly ate it, and quietly left.

I don’t know how he was feeling when he couldn’t find any more food in the trash bins. I guess he was still hungry? I guess he was disappointed? Or had he already gotten used to this kind of disappointment?

On the one hand, the human society has advanced so much that we have developed artificial intelligence which is becoming a thing. On the other hand, we still have starving people that are struggling for survival and have to look into trash bins for food.

AI will surely help make the world a better place (hopefully) as long as we use the technology appropriately. However, which part of the world does it make better? Does it make the already good part of the world even better and leave the already bad part even worse? Or does it make the goodness equally distributed to everyone, rich and poor?

Fairness and freedom conflict with each other and oftentimes we have to compromise. I think it’s impossible to quantitatively calculate the amount of compromise we want to make in order to get a balanced fairness and freedom, but I feel we can have a sense of how much fairness we want to sacrifice in order to protect freedom, and vise versa. However, I think we human society will surely sacrifice fairness for freedom when it comes to using the AI technology, because acting on freedom needs only one person, but acting on fairness requires cooperation among people. The former is way easier than the latter. I think those with advantages will enjoy the freedom to become even better, stronger, and more powerful, and don’t care too much about those with disadvantages. As a result, it looks to me that, more likely, AI may just make the already good part of the world even better and make the part that’s left behind fall behind even further.

I believe everyone has the freedom to use AI, but we shouldn’t overly sacrifice fairness for freedom. Instead, we should make AI’s benefit more or less evenly distributed among all the people all over the world.