The Future of AI: Proceed with Caution
Karen Christensen: You have said that the future of AI is being built “by a relatively few like-minded people within small, insulated groups.” Why is that such a big problem?
Amy Webb: In any field, if you have a homogenous group of people making decisions that are intended to benefit everyone, you end up with a narrow interpretation of both the future itself and the best way to move forward. When we’re talking about a transformational technology like AI, it involves systems that will be making decisions on behalf of everyone, so it follows that a lot of people are going to be left out of those decisions. The way that these systems behave and make decisions and choices is going to exclude a lot of people.
What is an artificial narrow intelligence system (ANI)?
This is what AI’s various ‘tribes’ are building. ANI’s are capable of performing a singular task at the same level or better than we humans can. Commercial ANI solutions — and by extension, the tribe — are already making decisions for us in our email inboxes, when we search for things on the Internet, when we take photos with our phones, when we drive our cars and when we apply for credit cards or loans.
They are also building artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems, which will perform broader cognitive tasks because they are machines that are designed to think like we do. The question is, Who exactly is the ‘we’ that these systems are being
