Cartoon: Are we ready?
“Are we ready?” by Iantoons
This new cartoon illustrates how artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at pace, but we might not have all the unintended consequences worked out yet.
Geoffrey Hinton, the acclaimed Godfather of AI, recently remarked, “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Boosters of AI often talk about how it has the potential to increase the productivity of the economy and could improve people’s lives. However, it needs to be managed to deliver on this promise.
Future societies have the potential to be more divided into those who have access to the compounding benefits of AI and those that do not. This could calcify social mobility in developed countries and make it harder for developing nations to catch up.
Potential ways to address this include ‘democratising’ access to AI, like what Amazon’s datacentre-as-a-service model provides for access to cloud computing.
Also, by leveraging AI to improve our education system, we can deliver results that increase the opportunities for social mobility. For example, Knowji, an AI education company designed for language learners, tracks each student’s progress and can predict words that students are likely to forget.
You can find more of Ian Foley’s cartoons here.
