Sitting at a latest convention assembly, one of many people across the desk stated: “expertise is sweet, however people are extra necessary”. That bought me pondering, and possibly not in a great way because it instantly made me see that way forward for machines operating the world, and people coming second.
Ex Machina, Terminator, Black Mirror … you title it, the longer term might be a world the place people are good, however expertise is extra necessary. That’s a debate … or is it? Certainly, expertise will solely be extra necessary if we let or not it’s. We management the machines; they don’t management us.
I suppose that’s the balancing debate we now have at present between our digital and bodily world.
For instance, throughout one other dialogue, a colleague was claiming that good economies might be run by machines who handle machine-to-machine commerce with no human concerned. That bought me pondering, and possibly in a great way.
I’ve all the time needed applied sciences to handle my life for me, so I don’t have to consider how my life is operating. All these ache within the ass bookings, points, issues with processes, hanging on name centre traces, urgent 1 for service and getting no service … there appears to be round half my day as of late coping with a financial institution that wishes a type stuffed, an airline reserving made for the mistaken day, a resort that has made a mistake on costs … you title it and I’ve bought an instance.
The difficulty right here is that when the methods get it mistaken, the people need to kind out the methods’ errors and, at present, that appears fairly typically.
So, we now have this stability between machines getting issues mistaken, people getting issues mistaken, and a future the place the 2 need to work in concord. It’s going to be a stability.
In some methods it’s just like the stability between losses and beneficial properties. We run a system the place fraudsters and criminals always attempt to break the system and steal sources. The stability is countermeasures to cease the underworld breaking into our world. Safety methods, PINs and passwords, safety keys, two-factor authentication, biometrics and extra are the measures taken by monetary establishments to attempt to keep away from fraud. It nonetheless doesn’t work, but it surely retains fraud to an appropriate degree. The identical might be true about man and machine.
We are going to enable machines to run economies, make us smarter, make our lives simpler and be integral to societies, cities and governments however, if we’re good, there’ll all the time be an off change. In spite of everything, they’re simply machines.
So the longer term is one the place the human-machine relationship develops and the machines are allowed to run the world … however solely so long as we enable it.
Postscript:
That is my hope.
