Artificial Intelligence: A Warning

Here’s an article that outlines a good case of what could happen when artificial intelligence starts taking over jobs, especially when owners and senior management implement an artificial intelligence that does not complement human skills but completely replaces them. There is nothing new in his warnings; we all know the possibilities because they have been enumerated before.

But the author does say we need to start now to lay the ground work to change our society so we can handle the implications of artificial intelligence. So what do we need to do? I’m not sure but companies need to operate with more than profit and growth in mind; companies need to expand their objectives wider to consider society in general, not just shareholders. Universal basic income as currently mentioned will not be enough because simply basic isn’t going to be enough to survive.

I believe society and business will have to reorder their value systems to enable to all live through this without clashes, violence and disorder. We have climate change happening, even though we have some people with their heads in the sand.

We have globalism, which is being woven ever more tightly together by technology. Just think, we have a world-wide phenomenon of the World Cup soccer where teams throughout the world just competed in Russia. And these teams are being composed of various nationalities. And we are all watching the games on our phones, TV’s or some other technological wonder. That’s the positive side of globalism. The negative side is the outburst of populism pushing out immigrants.

And then finally we have technology, spearheaded by artificial intelligence.

All three of these challenges are rolling through our world, making it very unstable. In order to meet these challenges, society, especially businesses, are going to have to dramatically change. It may be that capitalism will be destroyed if businesses do not move beyond the profit and growth mindset for the select few.