Firstly we listened to a Ted Talk by Zeynep Tufekci about the impact of the use of AI by the big software houses Facebook, Google and Amazon. The strategy of these businesses is to keep internet users glued to their respective sites to sell advertising and products. These organizations collect and process enormous amounts of personal data and use AI to greatly increase this data and categorise people into various groups which can be individually targeted by users and unscrupulous users, including political and government.
This was followed by two short videos from the Wall Street Journal about the revolution in robotics leading to the unemployment of large numbers of people worldwide, even including China. This is likely to have a society altering impact which must be addressed by governments over the next ten years. “The next ten years will be either the best or the worst in human history” according to an MIT professor.
Finally we looked at a couple of short segments from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 movie 2001-A Space Odyssey, showing what a super intelligent computer could do if it had no moral or ethical alignment with human values. This was followed by Ted Talks opposed to and in favour of the idea of an Existential Threat to humanity from Artificial Super Intelligence.
Videos used:
Zeynep Tufekci, Ted Talk
Wall St Journal Moving Up series
2001- A Space Odyssey video clips
Garry Booch Ted Talk
Nick Bostrom Ted Talk
Post script: Change of venue: Next month’s ‘Tech Savvy Talkers’ discussion group will be at ‘the Northo’ (North Eastern Hotel), 3 to 4pm on Thursday April 26th.
Les Rodgers