'Artificial intelligence is not our friend:' Hillary Clinton is worried about the future of technology

Associated Press/Andrew Harnik

• In a recent interview, Hillary Clinton expresses worries about the future of artificial intelligence and the role big tech plays in our daily lives.
• Clinton says that big tech companies are acquiring a trove of personal data that could possibly be manipulated and that Silicon Valley needs to be less opaque about the role their platforms played in the 2016 election.

Artificial intelligence may be one of the most exciting avenues in technology today, but its advances are causing alarm not only among science and technology elites like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking, but politicians as well.

On Wednesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed her anxieties about the future of artificial intelligence in an interview with Hugh Hewitt about her recently published memoir, What Happened.

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"Artificial intelligence is not our friend," said Clinton. "It can assist us in many ways if it is properly understood and contained. But we are racing headfirst into a new era of artificial intelligence that is going to have dramatic effects on how we live, how we think, how we relate to each other."

Clinton's says her worries stem, in part, from the effect the driverless car industry will have on the economy and the potential for millions of people - like cab drivers and delivery drivers - to lose their jobs in the era of autonomous cars.

"We are totally unprepared for that," Clinton said. "What do we do when we are connected to the internet of things and everything we know and everything we say and everything we write is, you know, recorded somewhere? And it can be manipulated against us."

Clinton said that part of her plan in running for office in 2016 was to create a blue ribbon commission of people with varying expertise who could determine American policy on artificial intelligence. And despite Clinton's admission that the tech industry is among the country's most admirable developing industries, she expressed concern at the trove of personal data being collected by leading tech companies and the role that sophisticated algorithms play in our day to day lives.

"That information can be used to sell products ... but it can also be used to stalk children, to purvey pornography, or in the case of our elections, to provide the channels for weaponizing information for political purposes," she said.

Clinton said she also had her doubts about tech companies owning up to the role they played in the 2016 election. Her worries are expressed just weeks after Facebook, Google, and Twitter were called upon to testify before Congress regarding the role their platforms played in Russia's interference with the 2016 election.

"I think we're kidding ourselves if we don't know more about the role that the tech companies played," said Clinton.

Read a full transcript of Hillary Clinton's interview with Hugh Hewitt here.