Greetings, Future Tensers,
“The trajectory of A.I. and its influence on society is only beginning,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella writes in Future Tense this week. Riffing on a prediction Bill Gates made about the internet more than 20 years ago, Nadella anticipates a “tidal wave” of developments in artificial intelligence research. With that prospect in mind, he proposes an array of industry priorities as we move ahead, insisting that we must protect privacy, guard against bias, and aspire for “algorithmic accountability.” In short, he holds, we need to think both ethically and empathically about emerging technologies—and ensure that those technologies can do the same.
As we’ve seen throughout this month’s Futurography course, driverless cars will almost certainly be one of the most immediate consequences of the A.I. technology that Nadella describes. Though the arrival of such vehicles will likely transform the automotive industry, Stanford-based researcher Stephen Zoepf argues that the coming revolution may underwhelm those of us literally carried along by it. Sarah Aziza writes that such incremental experience of change will be all the more evident, and perhaps all the more frustrating, in countries such as Saudi Arabia, since technological progress is no guarantee of social change.
Despite that, driverless cars will likely remain sources of anxiety for many, partly, Adam Waytz writes, because we tend to overestimate how much new developments will affect us. Nevertheless, Waytz believes we’ll quickly get used to self-driving cars, given “the capacity for our psychological immune system to make sense of negative events.” In the short term, Steve Casner suggests, we’ll probably need to worry more about semiautonomous vehicles than fully self-driving ones, since it’ll be hard for humans to take over in crises. But John Frank Weaver predicts that sooner or later our cars should be safe enough that they’ll be putting traffic police out of work, though there may still be reasons to pull a robot over.
Here are some of the other stories we read while copying and pasting redacted documents:
- Security: Josephine Wolff explores the persistence of physical signatures in a digital world.
- Medicine: Registering to be an organ donor is outmoded and needlessly complicated, but one nonprofit thinks we can update that process with the help of social media.
- Hacking: Does it seem like there have been a lot of data breaches and leaks lately? Lily Hay Newman explains what’s been going on.
- Trolling: We do ourselves a disservice when we treat Donald Trump like some basement-dwelling Internet monster, Whitney Phillips argues. He’s far more monstrous.
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
