This website was creating as part of the final project for my INFO 198 class at the University of Washington. The purpose of this website is to identify components of society where AI is or isn’t needed and to showcase this through various forms of media and an analysis of their unique perspectives. I decided to work on this concept because of how many different sources I was encountering through various coursework and how most of all the sources were about a specific sociotechnical interaction with AI by not a broader analysis of AI implementation on a societal level. I plan to take from more perspectives than I could experience in a lifetime, to formulate a general prediction about where AI will fail and where it will succeed. Furthermore, I have noticed a very optimistic trend recently regarding AI implementation where people are very excited about the extreme abilities of AI technology generally and apply that general sense of success into deploying AI technology, ignoring the logistical and social complexities of its actual deployment. While I’m not planning on defining this AI craze it is important to keep in mind why there is so much pressure to implement and deploy these AI systems on the public. This AI craze was another one of my main motivations for this project because I’ve seen how much enthusiasm my peers have had for AI especially LLMs but never understood why they were similarly optimistic for other AI technologies that haven’t been proven to have the same prowess as LLMs. Furthermore, my experience in my past tech policy class at the UW really opened my perspective for how little regulation we have for AI technology and data protection in the US.
AI Statement:
I did not use any form of generative AI to produce any of the writing or ideas on this website. I gathered the sources mainly from my coursework without the assistance of AI.
Do We Need AI? 