The source-based essay was an essay… based on sources! In this essay we had to find 4 different sources and write their rhetorical elements and use evidence to support it. I focused on artificial intelligence in this composition.
An Artificial Future
Technology is a big part of our world today. The way you’re reading this is mostly likely through a piece of technology, whether it was through a printer or a computer. There are many ways that technology has taken over and automates our lives, making it easier for us to function and do greater things with our limited time. For instance, GPS technology now allows for us to forego understanding a map and just get to where we need to be. Another example is that the internet and it’s search engine makes finding information so much easier. Will we ever get to a point where technology and humans are indistinguishable? This idea is called artificial intelligence. There are many controversies between scientists and philosophers on this subject. Some think it will be the final development that will transform our society into something greater. However, some believe that artificial intelligence will be the doom of humanity. In this essay pieces of rhetoric that discuss the negative aspects of AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be analyzed for their rhetorical components; which are language, rhetorical situation, tone, author, audience, medium, genre, purpose, and stance.
In the article “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t” the author, Jeremy Hsu, talks about how artificial intelligence could be used to help the medical field with assisting health care professionals treat their patients. However, we need to be careful in the implementation of AI into the healthcare field because if it is improperly implemented then it could be detrimental and end many lives. The rhetorical situation is the healthcare crisis in many countries. Many times people don’t have the luxury of being seen by a physician to address their health issues. Like in China where the overcrowded areas receive up to 10,000 people a day at hospitals (Hsu, “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t” ). Even if they are seen by a physician, the doctor could make mistakes because of the high amount of patients and paperwork they must go through. The audience he’s targeting is most likely people interested in tech since the article is published in tech section of Time Magazine’s website. The tone of this article is cautionary, Hsu is talking about how AI needs to be implemented carefully into the healthcare system or there could be dire consequences. In the article Hsu says, “Depending on how it is deployed, AI could either improve these inequalities, or make them worse.”(Hsu, “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t”). Hsu applies his cautionary tone here by saying that we need to be careful how AI is implemented. In the project conducted by Rich Caruan, a senior researcher at Microsoft, Machine learning (A form of AI) is used to look at patient history and decide if the patient needed serious medical attention. The AI said that the patient was a low risk case rather than a high risk case, which doctors decided he was (Hsu, “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t”). Hsu shows how AI can be used but could potentially harm the health care of a human, where it is better to consult with an actual physician rather than an AI system. The genre is technological journalism, because the author is a journalist that focuses mainly on science and technology as mentioned on the bottom of the article page, “Jeremy Hsu is a freelance journalist based in New York City. He frequently writes about science and technology…” (Hsu, “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t”).The medium of the piece is a website because that’s where it was published. The author’s stance on the subject of AI in healthcare is that it could be a great addition to our health care system but only if we’re careful about the way we implement it. Hsu quotes Glen Cohen saying that she supports AI implementation, but with “aggressive precautionary steps”(Hsu, “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t”) Throughout the piece the author uses words like, “caution”,”optimism”, and “harmful”. His language show the rhetorical elements of the writing. “optimism” and “harmful” shows that the author wants the audience to be excited for AI but also use “caution” when approaching the situation. All this comes to Hsu’s purpose of writing this article which was to make sure people are careful about implementing AI into healthcare.
Next is a newspaper source from Express titled, “Elon Musk: ‘A very serious danger to the public’ – tech giant’s dire warning revealed”, written by Callum Hoare, about Elon Musk’s warning about AI’s danger to humanity. The rhetorical situation is that the development of AI is moving along quickly, which he quotes Elon Musk saying that his product’s own AI will be “‘at least 100 to 200 percent safer’” and “‘The rate of improvement is really dramatic.’” (Callum Hoare, “Elon Musk: ‘A very serious danger to the public’ – tech giant’s dire warning revealed”). The audience of this piece is again, like in the previous article, people interested in science and tech. For the same reason as well, that the article is located in the science section of the website, which includes tech. The tone of the piece is ominous, because of the language that the author quotes Musk using. He quotes Musk saying, “‘I think that’s the single biggest existential crisis that we face and the most pressing one.’”(Callum Hoare, “Elon Musk: ‘A very serious danger to the public’ – tech giant’s dire warning revealed”). In this quote Musk uses language such as “crisis” to really magnify how dangerous the situation is. It gives an ominous tone to the article because it makes you scared of what the future might encompass with AI. The purpose of this piece is to inform us about the future of AI from Musk’s perspective, who co-founded a company researching AI. The article consists mostly of Elon Musk’s quotes from a talk he did at a tech conference in Austin, Texas. This also explains how the audience are the people who are interested in tech, since the writing is based on a tech conference. The medium is a website because it was published on a website, the genre is again tech journalism because the writer usually writes about tech and he is a journalist. It also is based on a huge topic in tech, artificial intelligence. Finally the stance of the writer is that we should be wary of artificial intelligence and that it could be a very dangerous development for the future of humanity. Hoare quotes Musk saying that Artificial Intelligence is more dangerous than nuclear war (Callum Hoare, “Elon Musk: ‘A very serious danger to the public’ – tech giant’s dire warning revealed”). The writer includes this point from Musk to show how much of a threat AI could potentially be, cementing his stance that he believes we should be careful about the coming of AI.
On the topic of Elon Musk, my third source is a web source, a tweet from Elon Musk. In the tweet he says the threat of North Korea is incomparable to AI. The author is Elon Musk an entrepreneur who founded/ co-founded companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, openAI, Paypal and many more. His audience is tech enthusiasts, like the previous two since he mainly posts on his twitter about technology. The rhetorical situation that this is responding to is the threat of artificial intelligence. In the tweet he says “If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be.Vastly more risk than North Korea.”(@elonmusk). This really shows that through his choice of language he defines the tone. Which is his choice to compare AI to North Korea as a threat. Right now people view North Korea as one of the biggest issues we need to deal with and he thinks A.I. should be above that in terms of danger level. The tone he defines with this is, again, an ominous tone, like in the article analyzed before. Also in the picture he includes, which is captioned, “In the end the machines will win”(@elonmusk). This shows that Musk views the future as bleak with artificial intelligence. The medium he uses to convey this is twitter and the genre which is quite related is a tweet. A tweet is a genre because it provides restrictions to which the author must abide by in order to stay in the genre, such as word count. His purpose is to warn people that AI is not to be taken lightly and could potentially end the world. Musk references North Korea, which shows how much of a threat AI is because North Korea is one of the most threatening countries to America due to ongoing conflicts. To him, AI is more of a threat because he fears that one day the machines and technology will take over where humans will no longer have control. His stance is the same as his purpose, which is that AI is not to be taken lightly and can potentially end the world. He is trying to persuade his audience to take this matter more seriously because if not we will lose our freedom to machines.
The last source is the academic source, which is the introduction of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era written by James Barrat. In this Barrat discusses the possibilities of AI not only the good but the bad as well. The rhetorical situation he is responding to is that some people are ignoring the risks of A.I.(Barrat 2). The author of the book is a filmmaker, who’s made films for National Geographic, TLC, Discovery Channel, and PBS. His audience is the same as all the other sources. However his medium is quite different, a book. The genre of this is non-fiction because he talks about actual real consequences of AI in the book, “This book explores the plausibility of losing control of our future to machines that won’t necessarily hate us, but will develop unexpected behaviors as they attain high levels of … intelligence.”(Barrat 5). The tone that he employs in this writing is skeptical. He says that he will discuss the positives of AI but also the negative. He uses language to impart on us a skeptic tone, “I spoke with scientists trying to create human-level artificial intelligence, which will have countless applications, and will fundamentally alter our existence ( if it doesn’t end it first).”(Barrat 3). In this he is very skeptical about AI and that it could potentially end us, like Musk said in his tweet and the Express newspaper article. His purpose is to explore the possibilities that the people he talked to about AI presented. Barrat says, “I resolved to write a book reporting their feelings and concerns, and reach as many people as I could with these ideas.”(Barrat 2). In this “their” is referring to the people who “knew about AI” that Barrat talks to, and tries to spread their ideas in this book. Barrat’s stance is that AI will end in a bad way for humanity. He says, “And how will the machines take over? Is the best, most realistic threatening to us or not?”(Barrat 4). In this it seems like he has a bias towards AI negatively impacting the human race. Another piece of evidence that supports this is, “Our species is going to mortally struggle with this problem.”(Barrat 5). A suggestion that Barrat believes that AI will be a huge challenge for us. Again enforcing that Barrat stance is against AI.
There are many things all these sources have in common. They all share the same audience and rhetorical situation. However they go about addressing this situation, that AI is coming, in different ways . Barrat’s book and Hsu’s article share a more skeptical tone, where as Musk’s tweet and Hoares article has a more ominous and hopeless tone. They all have around the same purpose and stance as well, to get people to be more skeptical and pessimistic of AI. However they all differ in language. I believe Musk’s tweet uses the best language to empower his ominous tone. This makes the rhetoric value better than the other three sources, even though it was the shortest. His comparison to North Korea really puts into perspective how scary the rhetorical situation is, since North Korea is one of the worst threats to the U.S. at the moment.
Citations
Hoare, Callum. “Elon Musk: ‘A Very Serious Danger to the Public’ – Tech Giant’s Dire Warning Revealed.” Express.co.uk, Express, 15 Sept. 2019, https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1178045/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-danger-public-tesla-spacex-open-ai-neuralink-spt.
Hsu, Jeremy. “Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Health Care For All — Unless it Doesn’t”
Time.com, Time Magazine, 13 Aug. 2019,
https://time.com/5650360/artificial-intelligence-health-care/
Musk, Elon (elonmusk). “If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea.” 11 Aug. 201, 8:29 p.m. Tweet.
Barrat, James. Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. United States. Thomas Thunne Books. books.google.com 2013. Web. 16 Sep. 2019
My Reflection
From doing the source based essay, I learned many things about my style of writing and revising. I also learned a bit about the topic I chose to do, artificial intelligence. My style of writing and revising is that I just like to write everything that comes to my head and then go through it carefully and slowly to fix any mistakes or anything I don’t like. I also learned that we are closer to actual artificial intelligence then I thought we would be. Elon musk mentions that during the tech conference that his cars are almost double what they once were in terms of artificial intelligence. He also projects that the cars will go even further beyond that in the coming years.
The most difficult thing for me was probably trying to find new ways to state old things. For example explaining the audience and rhetorical situation for each article when they were all pretty much the same. The repetitiveness of the essay was the most uncomfortable thing for me. Even thought it was uncomfortable I think it’s good for me to do it in order for me to get used to it. Since there’s going to be a lot of things in life that need repetition in order to get done. Like writing reports on an assignment could get repetitive if I’m forced to use the same type of formula for each assignment.
