The Beginning of My AI Journey
Hi I’m Miles Bourgeois and I am a Metalhead high school student located in Austin, Texas. I love thinking and writing about how computer science, commonly considered to be an emotionless subject, interacts with deep ethical issues such as sexism, classism and racism. I love taking a complex Comp Sci topic, adding emotion, Sociology and societal context and getting an ethical dilemma. What makes AI so interesting to me is that we are just starting to realize some of the ethical issues with it, and AI ethics is a relatively new field, and it is one defined by nearly impossible questions.
I am still in the Inspirit program, and I am working on using computer vision to aid in driverless cars and my instructor is Cade Crow, who is also one of the leaders of this ambassadorship program. All in all I have really enjoyed my experience with AI, not just because I like learning new computer science topics, but because this program introduced me to the wonderful language python. I had never coded in python before, but now it is becoming the main language that I use, the problem is that I learned python after learning Java. The difference between python and Java basically is that in java everything is set in stone, you declare what type a variable is, you give a class a type, it’s all so refined. That made the shift over to python a fairly difficult one, as I had to basically relearn coding syntax.
With my blog I am hoping to present ethical issues with AI to people who don’t know much about coding. I tend to write how I talk so while I won’t always be going super deep into code I can provide example code if people want. My blog will combine computer science, sociology and philosophy to make people think about the future of AI, how AI should be used and what AI really is. One of the first topics I will probably write about is simulated consciousness, and by covering that one topic we will also learn about human consciousness, how our consciousness evolved, and whether it is even feasible to simulate consciousness. I hope to show the average person that AI isn’t all code, and I want to inspire more talks about the philosophy behind AI. We talk about the future of AI as if it is a far off place, but in reality we are facing many ethical issues with AI now, and the more people we have thinking about this, the more we will get done. I have found that I have a very open-source philosophy about this as that is how I believe AI ethics will be “solved”.
Miles Bourgeois is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.
