Category: Speculations

The taboo is broken. The possibility that AI is an existential risk has now been voiced in public by many of the world’s political leaders. Although the question has been discussed in Silicon Valley and other futurist boltholes for decades, no country’s leader had broached it before last month. That is the lasting legacy of the Bletchley Park summit on AI Safety, and it is an important one. It might not be the most important legacy for the man who made the summit happen. According to members of the opposition Labour Party, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was using the...

After Silicon Valley, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may be the most future-oriented and optimistic place on the planet. Futurism and techno-optimism are natural mindsets in a country which has pretty much invented itself from scratch in two generations. During this period its people have progressed from a mediaeval lifestyle to being 21st century metropolitans. So it is unsurprising that the UAE has been quick to spot the enormous future significance of artificial intelligence to all of us, and to pioneer its deployment. It is not just the UAE. The leaders of all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council...

We’re all wondering how to survive the virus: how to stay alive, and also solvent. Assuming we manage that, what will be its lasting impacts? 1. Appreciation of exponentials The rising death tolls in many countries has been shocking to watch. Many people are getting their first up-close-and-personal view of the astonishing power of exponential growth. We have seen it for decades in the dramatic growth of computing power described by Moore’s Law, but like the mythical boiling frog in the saucepan (it really is a myth: frogs are not that daft), we acclimatise to improvements on that timescale, and...

The 2010s were an ironic decade. Most metrics show that human welfare improved at an extraordinary rate, but many of us seem to be fearful or resentful, or both. The world is far richer in 2020 than it was in 2010, and global inequality is declining. There is still plenty of poverty, egregious inequality, and injustice, and there are still brutal wars and civil unrest. But overall, life expectancy is sharply up, and child mortality and deaths during childbirth are sharply down. Despite global warming, the number of deaths and injuries from climate-related disasters has fallen significantly, and many rich...

Amid all the talk of robots and artificial intelligence stealing our jobs, there is one industry that is benefiting mightily from the dramatic improvements in AI: the AI ethics industry. Members of the AI ethics community are very active on Twitter and the blogosphere, and they congregate in real life at conferences in places like Dubai and Puerto Rico. Their task is important: they want to make the world a better place, and there is a pretty good chance that they will succeed, at least in part. But have they chosen the wrong name for their field? Artificial intelligence is...

Every generation thinks the challenges it faces are more important than what has gone before. American journalist Tom Brokaw bestowed the name “the greatest generation” on the people who grew up in the Great Depression and went on to fight in the Second World War. As a late “baby boomer” myself, I certainly take my hat off to that generation. The Boomers were named for demography: they were a bulge in the population (“the pig in the python”) caused by soldiers returning from the war. They saw themselves as special, and maybe they were. They invented sex in the 1960s,...

As usual, I made some forecasts this time last year about how AI would change, and how it would change us. It’s time to look back and see how those forecasts for 2018 panned out. The result: a 50% success rate, by my reckoning. Better than the previous year, but lots of room for improvement. Here are the forecasts, with my verdicts in italics. 1. Non-tech companies will work hard to deploy AI – and to be seen to be doing so. One consequence will be the growth of “insights-as-a-service”, where external consultants are hired to apply machine learning to...

Powerful new technologies can produce great benefits, but they can often produce great harm. Artificial intelligence is no exception. People have numerous concerns about AI, including privacy, transparency, security, bias, inequality, isolation, oligopoly, and killer robots. One which perhaps gets less attention than it deserves is algocracy. Decisions about the allocation of resources are being made all the time in societies, on scales both large and small. Because markets are highly efficient systems for allocating resources in economies characterised by scarcity, capitalism has proved highly effective at raising the living standards of societies which have adopted it. Paraphrasing Churchill, it...

Satisfying stories feature a hero or heroine facing jeopardy and triumphing over adversity. This explains why most science fiction is dystopian: that’s where the jeopardy is. This gives us a problem. Science fiction provides the metaphors we use to think about and discuss the future, and unfortunately, for every Star Trek there are multiple Star Wars and Terminators. Fear of the future stops many of us from thinking about it seriously. Maybe we should offset the likes of Black Mirror with some White Mirror. So here is a description of the world in which AI has turned everything upside down...

Robert Atkinson and I have made the 749th Long Bet shown above (and online here). Robert is president and founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. Robert’s claim With the rise of AI and robotics many now claim that these technologies will improve exponentially and in so doing destroy tens of millions of jobs, leading to mass unemployment and the need for Universal Basic Income. I argue that these technologies are no different than past technology waves and to the extent they boost productivity that will create offsetting spending and investment, leading to offsetting job...

This post is co-written with Julia Begbie, who develops cutting-edge online courses as a director of a design college in London. Some people (including us) think that within a generation or two, many or most people will be unemployable because machines will perform every task that we can do for money better, faster and cheaper than we can. Other people think that humans will always remain in paid employment because we will have skills to offer which machines never will. These people usually go on to argue that humans will need further education and training to remain in work –...