The Two Faces of Artificial Intelligence
The Two Faces of Artificial Intelligence
The ongoing development of artificial intelligence means that humans will simultaneously confront multiple interfaces of AI that exhibit a range of its propensity to contribute to good and bad, progress and destruction, and act as a perpetrator of violence or a tool for peace.
In 2021, Amazon and Google won a tender to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing services. The deal, dubbed “Project Nimbus,” represented under half a percent of Google’s sales in 2021; yet it was a strategic move for the company to secure a competitive position against the larger cloud businesses of Amazon and Microsoft. The contract was officially framed around civilian-based digital transformation contributions; however, concerns arose that the cloud service could be used for more military-based purposes in the West Bank and for the facilitation of human rights violations.
During the same time, Google’s DeepMind team produced a research report in 2024 titled “AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation” that conveyed findings from the “Habermas Machine,” a large language model (LLM) that serves as an AI mediator. The system, developed by researchers, could broadly “respect the view of the majority in each of our little groups” while producing outputs that did not “make the minority feel deeply disenfranchised” by acknowledging minority views. Even though this innovation for conflict resolution is still in the early stages and contains flaws, it demonstrated how the same company could exist within a flux of advancing technology for peaceful mediation while simultaneously contributing to the perpetuation of violent conflict in other areas.