Ai will kill us all. Geoffrey Hinton says we're all doomed.

Ok, so that's quite a sensational headline, but let's dive into that a little.

If you haven't had chance yet, check out the Diary of a CEO podcast with Geoff, the "Godfather" of Ai, and let me know your thoughts.  Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We’ve Already Lost Control! Geoffrey Hinton

Whilst eating my lunch I got into a typical comedic and interesting discussion with Neil, the handyman at the local co working space, my kind of guy, funny, great banter, my age so we share a number of life experiences.  We started talking about tattoos, cancel culture and the comedic value of getting sunburnt walking to the shops, which having chatted through what I do for a living this turned very quickly into a discussion on the benefits and risks of Ai, as it tends to happen when my victim that day is no technical or a luddite like me.

Being an Ai optimist and die hard nerd, I jumped straight to the defence of Ai and the great things it will do, explaining how its been around for years and how I worked with the local health board on a cancer detection solution in 2018, and more importantly how it certainly won't be taking Neil's job of knocking down walls and building extremely clever things with his hands.  Geoff tells us, if you were to be leaving school now, become a plummer (or a handyman), Ai isn't replacing you anytime soon.

What stuck me though, is I quickly ended up talking about Geoff and the theme of his interview, and how we seems to be sleepwalking into a scenario where the unintended impacts of a hugely powerful technology could be a catastrophe waiting to happen.  

The internet has changed the world, it has also made it a lot more dangerous.  The advent of social media has brought us closer together, it, arguably has also made us addicted, dumber and highlights the ugly part of society at every single opportunity.

When I look at what appears on TikTok, Insta and other platforms in terms of what Ai is being used for, it has a real dark undertone in the hugely influential, impressionable part of society, and although there has been some truly inspiring comedy and retro applications it has quickly turned into anonymous content creators building offensive, racist, sexist and highly sexualised content that as a father of two young children really scares me.

We then start to talk about how our generation watched classics that have been retold numerous ways over the decades but when you think of Star Trek (the original) replicators and today's 3D printing applications, Dick Tracy and his talking wristwatch, Knightrider and his talking car, even the Jetsons showing video calls in the 60's. 

The older of you will remember 2001: A Space Odyssey and the "newspads" compared to today's tablets, we have a huge array of examples of where fiction has become a reality.

Then we take Ai, speaking of HAL 9000 from the aforementioned Space Odyssey, KITT, the voice of the computer on the Starship Enterprise ..... Minority Report and Tom Cruise famously using Ai to predict who has certain abilities or predilections and of course, Skynet.

Are we as a society walking into a Skynet scenario and what are doing about creating guardrails, applying safeguards that we haven't successfully managed to deploy with the internet or social media?  How are we looking at controlling something that even the creators are now saying will be our downfall?

One thing I do know, all of this is built on data, controlled and governed by humans (currently) and is within our control.  The question is, who is leading the way on making sure that our insatiable appetite for the next amazing innovation in technology isn't the next thing to be used against us?

What do you think?