Sir Tim Berners-Lee lays out nightmare scenario where AI runs the financial world
Web Publication: Tech World, by Scott Carey
I’ve been sitting on this article a couple weeks but it won’t run out of relevance – ever. As you may know, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the architect of the Internet. For those raised on Al Gore, maybe you’ll find that surprising. What is surprising is that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is still very much in his prime even when the Internet seems like such an all-inclusive reality for the lifetime of so much of the world’s population under a certain age. So when Sir Tim speaks about technology, we very well should listen.
This article covers his remarks about AI powering the not just lowly positions of robots picking strawberries, but decision-making, executive positions, and even political offices. Prior concerns about robotics and AI have focused on where that will leave the workforce. Millions of service sector jobs are currently in the cross hairs. It’s not if, but when. Next up will be transportation. So the bad boss making those mean spirited decisions about ROI and the rest of the front office can rest easy while software makes them big bucks, yes? No. It’s not too hard to be smarter than management once AI fine-tunes their role. Expect to see white-collar disruption within five years. That’s my number by the way.
So just to take this to the next round: There is a round of robotics that is now receiving AI development in using deadly force for military or police work, all safely conceptual. Correct? Confined within a lab environment? Of course. So what happens when a budget strapped municipality hires an AI executive and is networked to a police force that is also saving money by using semi-autonomous law enforcement robots? You get the picture. At one point science fiction was safely in the distant but now we have all these technologies being developed in hundreds or thousands of separate labs and there is no guiding authority on how they may ultimately connect themselves in the very near future. BTW, AI can program too, much better than us.
It used to be a fanatical leap to suggest that we’d become slaves to our machine overlords but there is now a traceable path toward that end. That path is paved with profit motive every step of the way and for that, there is nothing in this world that can stop it.