In our latest conversation, Steve Wells and I introduce three future scenarios (horizon 2050). They can be discomforting, inspiring, or scary, but a chance for us to reflect on risks and opportunities. We’d love to hear your thoughts and integrate them with our next foresight conversation!
1️⃣🎍Frugal AI (Constraint for Good): Following concerns around ethics, bias, privacy, education, child protection, our relationship to truth has led to intensified regulatory effort. This hasn’t stopped innovation, but has induced the development of AI tools in a responsible way. GenAI content is not omnipresent. Disclaimers enable individuals to identify AI-agents and AI-generated content. Moderation is better as policies are favoring democracy and safety. Sustainability is at the core, completely intricated. We teach children to not overuse technology for entertainment nor overly conduct search and chat with AI bots. Companies have usage quotas: each search is attached to a carbon footprint, so we are aware of the environmental cost. We rely on eco-tablets, low-consumption devices powered by solar energy.
2️⃣📲The Tech-Supercharged World (on the brink of collapsing): We live in a world submitted to technology, filled with immersive experiences, virtual worlds to retreat to, interactive assets everywhere we go, overlays of information and augmented media on top of the real world, multiple devices, lighter and smarter headsets, miniaturized wearables with sensors and trackers, but also gestures and haptics to interact with our homes, cars, workplaces, and cities. We live in symbiosis with this AI-led environment. We are surrounded by a profusion of AI-generated assets, books, TV shows, phone operators, so that it tends to be overwhelming; new mental health syndromes emerge. A popular way to earn revenue is to harness our identity and monetize personal data (our biometrics, face, voice, style, humanity) so that now the logic is the other way around: machines need to be fed with real-human components to ensure it simulates humanity with enough accuracy and empathy.
3️⃣🌬The Reality Continuum (growth/transformation): GenAI continues to develop and a variety of use cases make our life easier. Content is dispensed throughout the day on a variety of media, online, offline, in the metaverse, via robotics. We have a companion robot and AI agents on our social apps, but we get used to interacting with those, similarly as today we make the difference between talking to Alexa and talking to our neighbors. Integrated detectors help us identify if content is human vs. AI generated: we update them as we update anti-virus; companies we trust help us to apply filters similar to spam filters. When in doubt in phone conversations with our loved ones, we use AI-safe words to confirm our identity. It is about normalizing AI, making it part of human life, making it familiar, safe, reassuring. Institutions help us make informed choices.
Listen here: https://youtu.be/renj98j9B5c?feature=shared
Silicon Humanism 