What we can learn from the past to help navigate the AI storm…
There’s a technology out there that’s coming for you. You can’t escape it, it’s already acquired too much momentum and its progress is accelerating. It’s like watching a tidal wave, you can already see it on the horizon and it’s coming fast for the land. And on the shoreline people whirl about in panic, wondering what they are going to do and how they’ll cope with it.
Companies are falling over themselves to try and get their strategic heads around it, what it might mean for productivity and profit but also what havoc it might wreak in terms of their carefully constructed organizations. Will they be able to exploit the wave of opportunity which this technology seems to be bringing or will they get swamped by it, losing out to others who are more focused and agile?
Governments worry about the huge social disruption likely to come as it cuts a wide swathe of jobs which can be replaced by smart technology embedded in an army of robots. Not only pairs of hands but people with an extensive range of skills will be side-lined to the unemployment queues. And the new skills which night need urgent training to help the workforce adapt and exploit the positive benefits of productivity improvement offered by the technology are not clear, hard to plan for. Worst of all the impact of this will not be felt in a handful of old sectors which can be exchanged for new ones; this wave of change threatens across the board.
Couple that with concerns about privacy, about ethics, about how to control something whose potential seems to rewrite the rules of the game. There’s an urgent need for regulation, for setting up guidelines and guardrails but a lack of understanding about where and how to construct these and a distinct sense of trying to close stable doors after the horse has long ago made its escape and is now roaming free across the landscape.
Not surprisingly the media is full of stories about this, playing up the panic to the point where the technology is constantly centre stage, the discourse around it doom-laden. A Chicken-Licken world in which there seems to be daily reminders that the sky is about to fall in. Headlines and programme titles like ‘Beware the march of the robots’ and ‘Now the chips are down’ do little to help an atmosphere of calm critical appraisal.
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