A Silicon Valley employee told a friend of mine that he sees nothing sustainable about the info-technology (IT) industry. He considers last July's worldwide shutdown of airlines, banks, hospitals and emergency services (caused by an erroneous software update) a warning. While Silicon Valley companies have stopped hiring people (because they anticipate that A.I.s will soon do jobs at a much lower cost), Silicon Valley workers feel scared that info-technologies will continue; and they fear that IT will stop.
Roger McNamee, once a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, says, "For too long, the public has trusted Silicon Valley. For 50 years, the products that came out of the Valley made us more capable and more productive." While manufacturers promote every new technology product as if it will improve what came before, McNamee says, "That has not been the case since the iPhone was introduced in 2007." The IT industry, he observes, is now displacing workers with artificial intelligence, displacing real currency with crypto, and getting rid of any kind of taxation on wealth. "And so," he says, "we need to change our relationship to technology. We need to say 'No' to A.I."
In a society that depends on vulnerable technologies like electricity, inter-continental shipping, individually-owned cars, the Internet, mobile communications, and now, A.I., how does anyone change their relationship to technology? How do we say "no" to A.I.? To what do we say "Yes?"
None of these men gives directions.
WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
A.I. is a set of computer technologies that assembles and stores billions of bits of data and uses algorithms and computational power to recognize patterns, make decisions, make predictions, solve problems-- and create new things. If you get help from Siri or Alexa, pose questions to search engines like Google, or receive product recommendations based on previous purchases, you're engaging A.I.
Weather forecasters use A.I.
Robots that weld and transport die casings on assembly lines"are A.I.s.
A.I.s book travel arrangements, check-in guests at hotels, mix drinks, deliver meals to restaurant tables, connect Uber drivers with passengers, and tell owners when their car needs maintenance.
They predict mining outcomes.
A.I.s predict the likelihood of a person acquiring a disease, identify harmful interactions between different drugs, predict how a contagious disease could spread.
The military uses A.I.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
