Imagine a Star Wars movie or a Star Trek TV episode. Set far in the future, they have tricorders, star ships, robots and holodecks. But they still have captains and pilots to fly the starship. They still have engineers to puzzle out problems – why aren’t they using AI?
There are two ways to approach that question and they both have interesting answers:
First, we can drop through the rabbit hole and imagine that the reason fits into the scifi universe. The people of those universes must have made a choice to limit both the use of AI and the development of its capability. AI is only a bit-part in the show because it is simply a tool that aids humans in their work. Before they developed AI, the people must have looked at the world they inhabited and imagined how they wanted their future to be and chosen that they would continue flying the starship rather than developing AI to deliver groceries, drive their cars and tell them what they wanted to watch on TV. Somehow, that choice was a universal choice made by all civilizations.
See also: The work we want – how AI will change our working lives
Alternatively we could remember that these are just stories, written by script writers and directed by directors. That suggests that the choice was made by them in the interest of entertainment. They must have felt that a world where an AI drove the starship and solved the problems and analysed the data would be so dull that no one would want to watch. As a result, they chose a world where humans flew the starship. Which world do we want to live in?
Either lens offers a perspective of AI development that is too often overlooked. We, the humans, are in charge and we have a choice as to what kind of world we want to live in.
Kay delivered the opening keynote at the Humans in Charge AI Symposium in Budapest hosted by the NMHH (National Media and Infocommunications Authority) in which she considered these choices and how we might make them today.
It’s not uncommon to encounter the question “How should we adapt to the changes that AI is bringing?” There is an alternative question that we could ask: “What would we like our future to look like? How do we get there? We are in charge.”
