• Question: dose technology benefit everybody

    Asked by connor to Yee Whye, Valerie, Nick, Mackenzie, Lin, Jun, Jacob, Brian, Anna on 18 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Mackenzie Graham

      Mackenzie Graham answered on 18 Nov 2019:


      No, it doesn’t because not everyone has access to the technology, and because not all technology is designed to benefit everyone. AI is ‘trained’ on massive amounts of data, and the kind of data that it is given influences how it learns. For example, if you only ever heard people speaking English, and never visited another country, or heard a different language, you would probably think that English was the only language that existed. And when you heard French for the first time, you would have no idea what to think. AI is like this too. If we train it on data from certain kinds of people, it will be very useful to those kinds of people, but less useful to others.

    • Photo: Lin Shuyu

      Lin Shuyu answered on 18 Nov 2019:


      I actually disagree with Machenzie. I think technology will benefit everybody. Technology is meant to make life easier and such an action will spread out to everywhere in the world. For example, telephone was created and it started with Western world, but now it has been used almost everywhere around the world. I do agree that not everyone benefits from technology equally or simultaneously, but I think technology overall will bring benefits to humans, our society and hopefully beyond just human race. So as a researcher, by pushing the boundary of technology we are benefits many people if not all.

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