Artificial Intelligence is coming – if you’re not afraid, perhaps you should be

The new face of consciousness

The path to the apocalypse is a well-trodden one – at least cinematically.  Like many children of the eighties I kept one eye out for ‘Skynet’ and oversized Austrian gentlemen in black leather, who it could be assured, would definitely “be back”.  However, according to Silicon Valley veteran Andrew Keen’s new book – ‘The Internet is Not The Answer’ – it turns out this apocalyptic foreboding might not only be grounded, but more worryingly might also be realized within the next five years.

“By 2020, according to Swiss telecommunications giant Ericsson, there will be 50bn connected devices in the world” Keen informs us, “combined with the imminent emergence of artificial intelligence – the race against the machine has already begun.”

However before you amend your will or join a doomsday cult, Keen, a former history lecturer at The University of Massachusetts and one-time Internet evangelist and Silicon Valley entrepeneur, is not actually predicting the annihilation of our species.  His predication – no less fatalistic – is that this “second machine age” will result in the redundancy of huge swathes of the working population.

Research from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University predicts that the jobs most “at risk from robots” are:

• Receptionists / clerical workers – 96% risk
• Security guards – 84% risk
• Fast food cooks – 81% risk
• Financial advisors – 58% risk
• Journalists – 11% risk

At last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt confirmed that “this race between computers and people” will define the next quarter of a century.  Google is unsurprisingly at the forefront of automation with its self-driving cars program and recent purchase of Boston Dynamics – a producer of militarized robots.  Again, Google’s ethical stance gives one slight cause for concern.

Is the future really that bleak?

As early as 2011, viewers of the American game show Jeopardy enjoyed the spectacle of IBM’s ‘Watson’ computer beating all contenders.   A version of ‘Watson’ is now being used successfully as a cancer diagnostic device at the University of Texas and due to be rolled out across America this year.

Recently another Google acquisition, DeepMind, announced the creation of a live neural network able to play video games in “a similar fashion to humans”.

Individually all small steps; but with the emergence of new processing technology and big data algorithms, Keen predicts that A.I. is “closer that most people realize”.

Currently we have no way to identify the true nature of the threat this poses.  It cetainly doesn’t look good if you are a receptionist or security guard, or as Keen goes on to argue, a lawyer or a doctor.  It is also both slightly alarming and conversely comforting to discover that leading universities such as Oxford and Cambridge are setting up research bodies to investigate the potential of an A.I. apocalypse.

But it would be hard to argue against a supercomputer that helps to save lives, as ‘Watson’ has already started doing; and you would be hard pushed to paint Google as an embryonic ‘Skynet’ (however tempting it might be).  The only thing that is certain is that the real push in Silicon Valley is not for wearable tech or the future of entertainment broadcasting, but for automation.

And as Keen points out, the most immediate danger of A.I. is to jobs.  In this age of connectivity, that on the surface promises the democratization of fame, power and wealth, never before has the divide between those “who have” and those “who don’t” been so wide – sadly It is hard to see how A.I. won’t extend this gap further.

With his new book, Keen joins a long line of critics like Jaron Lanier and the Pulitzer Prize winning Nicholas Carr, that are trying to warn us of this automation nightmare we are apparently sleepwalking into.

The advice: “It’s time to wake up”.

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The Internet is Not The Answer is available now through Amazon – and depending on when you order, your purchase just might be delivered via automated unmanned drone.

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FOR AN APOCALYPSE PLAYLIST SEE MY “10 MOST APPROPRIATE SONGS TO WATCH THE END OF THE WORLD TO”