Challenging AI Hype: Balancing Innovation with Responsible Decision-Making

Addiction Economy Thought for Today - Don't let the market dictate the future of society. The big finding of our Addiction Economy work and my last 42 years in 'Responsible Innovation' working on responsibility in nanotech, synthetic biology, neurotics, AI, robotics. There are lots of ways to constrain harmful products and deviant markets and more importantly nurture pro-society markets - we need to start using them with some products using AI software.

AI is not the answer for everything, it is over hyped because people with existing monopolies have too much money to chuck at whatever they fancy and a vision not shared by society. Which ordinary people know, but somehow many politicians seem to be bamboozled by!

Liking Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, responding to remarks at The Times Tech Summit by Feryal Clark, Labour’s new minister for AI and digital government.

“When you hear Feryal Clark saying public services have completely failed, that’s simply not true. Most things work, actually. There’s a lot of stuff we’d like to fix [but] once you get this notion that, ‘that’s all failed, let’s replace it with AI, and some AI general intelligence can fix it’, that’s extremely dangerous.”

He added: “The horror of the conversation in this country in particular over the last two years is [that] the people who are most confident about how the future is going to work out have dominated the conversation. The only thing we can confidently say is confident projections of the future won’t pan out.
“We need people who ‘know they don’t know’ around the table, the ones who understand it requires a conversation across society and that we need to get together and listen to all the voices before we make the critical decisions about what our children’s … future is going to look like.”

Lawrence also criticised Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, for failing to challenge a prediction at a UK-hosted technology summit last year from Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, that AI would put an end to all work.

“This is a total absurdity,” Lawrence said. “That … it was just accepted shows what a difficult situation we are in, in terms of public understanding of this technology. I found it horrific, but it was the centre of our summit.”

BTW, I wrote 5 lessons we need to learn about tech in 2017. Stands up nicely.
I might re-write with AI in mind.

https://lnkd.in/d7MKU5p

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