ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS changing the way we think about authorship, art, and white collar work. It may be changing how we think, full stop.

As artificial intelligence, or machine learning, becomes more integrated into people’s everyday lives, it runs the risk of “replacing moral judgments, or by replacing practical judgments, or replacing everyday judgments,” Nir Eisikovits, professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said this week on The Codcast. 

Decisions as minor as what to watch on a streaming service or as major as whether to approve someone for a mortgage are being gently, or not so gently, automated. 

“The basic point is making a judgment like, ‘Should somebody get a promotion? Should somebody get a mortgage?’ used to be something that a human being decided by weighing all kinds of particulars using their spidey sense or whatever,” Eisikovits said. “Increasingly, they’re made by machines, and if using your judgment is a little bit like going to the gym – it’s like a muscle … use it or lose it – then more and more we’re, in more and more contexts, not using it.”

Eisikovits founded the Applied Ethics Center at UMass Boston. Since the center opened in 2017, Eisikovits and his colleagues have been thinking about the impact of artificial intelligence on moral decision-making and its unique relationship to work and creativity. 

Flashy fears about artificial intelligence are probably not the best targets for human hypervigilance, Eisikovits notes. “One important misconception is that we’re moving closer and closer to a sentient kind of Skynet AI that’s capable of generating its own intentions and finally becoming a robot overlord,” he said. “I think that’s not in the cards for the near future.”

A risk of increased reliance on artificial intelligence is, instead, about short-cutting many of the basic moral and creative decisions that people make. If a machine can suggest possible song samples for aspiring musicians, or go further and create a music video from a popular artist nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, the relationship between artist and artistic product can get confusing.

“We admire great performances, because they represent the kind of giftedness that awes us,” Eisikovits said. “And in the case of technologically generated performance, our admiration moves from the giftedness to an engineer or to a pharmacist or to a lab person. And it’s not clear what art can still do for you under those conditions.”

There are some upsides to better machine learning, in theory. A person’s “spidey sense” could boil down to personal bias that a more fair machine learning system could counteract. On the other hand, the bias of a programmer or the pools of data that machines are trained to sort through could fundamentally taint the outcome. 

Famously, Eisikovits recalled, facial recognition technologies were better at recognizing light-skinned faces than dark-skinned faces because the data used to train the programs used more White people. 

“Importantly, if there’s enough political will, and commercial pressure, and both, then those biases can be fixed, just like Microsoft fixed its facial recognition software in response to pressure,” he said. “So in some way, I think the extension-of-bias question is a big question. It’s important. But it can be addressed. What I think can’t be addressed, or is much harder to address, has to do with the loss of capacity from this replacing us in some basic functions.”

Every new technology is met with a level of agonized fretting about replacing human beings in some essential way, Eisikovits said. The invention of writing displaced oral storytelling traditions in much of the world. Industrial machinery could accomplish intense physical tasks beyond the human body’s potential. 

Artificial intelligence’s capacity to replace workers is similar to industrial machinery in that it can perform labor-intensive, low-skill work more efficiently – reviewing large amounts of documents in legal or medical fields, for instance. 

It ties into a broader conversation about the nature of work and fulfillment. Is there an inherent value to making a human being pore through tens of thousands of pages, or summarize stock briefings, or pull together a basic marketing deck? CommonWealth last month considered the rise of the four-day work week, which proponents assert gives employees more time for their personal lives while counterintuitively getting the same amount of work done as they might in a five-day work week.

“What seems to be happening is rather than jobs being replaced wholesale, parts of jobs are being replaced,” Eisikovits said. “So people’s job definitions are changing. I think there’s no way around that, meaning that sooner or later, you’ll need fewer people to generate the same kind of productivity.”

JENNIFER SMITH

FROM COMMONWEALTH

In-state tuition: Momentum seems to be building for giving undocumented students access to much lower in-state tuition rates for both humanitarian and practical reasons. 

– The push for in-state rates at Massachusetts colleges and universities comes after the Legislature last year passed a new law giving undocumented residents access to driver’s licenses. That law passed for both humanitarian and practical reasons, and the same playbook is being followed with in-state tuition rates. The practical reasons center around labor shortages and a shrinking pool of college graduates.

– Massachusetts is an outlier among the 15 states with the largest share of undocumented students. According to a recent report from The Education Trust, a national advocacy organization, a dozen of these, including Texas, California, Florida, and Illinois, offer access to in-state tuition for any undocumented students. Read more.

OPINION

Fare debate: Phineas Baxandall of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center and Stacy Thompson of the Livable Streets Alliance say money is needed to keep and expand fare free buses. Read more.

Fare debate: Sen. Lydia Edwards calls for a low-income fare at the MBTA. Read more.

No more stalling: Larry Chretien of the Green Energy Consumes Alliance says a new law is needed to put an end to the Department of Public Utilities big stall on municipal electricity aggregation. Read more.

Not just any fire: City Councilor Elizabeth Maglio and Brita Lundberg of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility say a dangerous chemical fire in Braintree leaves behind a lot of questions. Read more.

FROM AROUND THE WEB

BEACON HILL

Massachusetts set up a mental health hotline and 6,000 people called in the first six months. (WBUR)

MUNICIPAL MATTERS  

The former chief of staff to Lawrence Mayor Brian DePena is arrested on child pornography charges. (Eagle-Tribune)

A second member of the Easthampton School Committee resigns in the wake of the superintendent fiasco. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)

BUSINESS/ECONOMY

JP Morgan Chase bought the assets of troubled First Republic Bank after it was placed in receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (NPR)

EDUCATION

A Berkshire Eagle editorial raises concerns about a plan by the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams to convert a dorm into housing for the homeless.

ARTS/CULTURE

Boston theaters are still trying to regain their footing following COVID. (WBUR)

The owners of a “gingerbread house” in Tyringham are not sure what to do about its leaking thatched roof. Got any ideas? (Berkshire Eagle)

Cambridge city officials suspended The Sinclair’s liquor license for one day last week after a woman claimed the concert venue and restaurant didn’t help her when she was drugged at the establishment last year. (MassLive)

TRANSPORTATION

In a jarring new twist to the tortured South Coast Rail saga, the City of New Bedford, whose leaders have long clamored for the rail extension, are now considering suing the MBTA based on a claim that the agency improperly seized land in the city being used for the new commuter rail line. (Boston Globe) 

Never mind the countless slow zones because of aging rails, the MBTA could find itself swimming in problems, according to a new report on climate change. (Boston Globe) 

ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT

A new urban forestry master plan in Worcester calls for an even distribution of trees across the city to help counteract heat islands and reduce the impacts of climate-change related flooding. (Worcester Telegram)

CRIMINAL JUSTICE/COURTS

Workers at a recycling center in Rochester find the remains of a baby girl in a shipment of waste from Martha’s Vineyard. (Associated Press)

MEDIA

Northeastern journalism professor Dan Kennedy says the Boston Globe owes the public an explanation for the three corrections posted to its story a week ago on MBTA employees working remotely. (Media Nation)

PASSINGS

Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, dies at 88 in Canton. (NPR)