02-03 The Dark Side

While we love to wallow in the magic of the new technologies sweeping the land, we must be aware of the dark side.
Russia recently passed a series of laws, as has many countries that makes it a crime to basically do anything that is not in the interest of the state. Those laws are one thing, what’s more insidious is the state watching our every move. In China their facial recognition systems keep an eye on skillions of citizens. Imagine getting a jay-walking ticket from one of these systems! While we might imagine this could never happen in our part of the planet, Britain is awash in cameras monitoring their citizens. So, when you add AI to a camera you have some potentially dark outcomes. Remember the Snowden affair that rocked the world? This tech is now no longer limited to big organization like the NSA. You and I can implement them in our workplace, if we so desire.
The upcoming G5 networks require skillions of poles with devices spewing and sucking in data at a prodigious rate. The downside? Maybe cancer. There has been precious little testing on this new tech and the industry wants us to trust them. And largely we do. But this massive influx of electromagnetic waves might well leave us, or at least our children, with some kind of unwelcome conditions. The only sensible solution is to continue testing and testing.
Planes trains and automobiles are now basically just containers for AI. Elon Musk maintains firmly that his newest auto-drive Tesla is significantly safer than if a human were driving. Recently another Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed killing all onboard. The fault was not wonky hardware, it was wonky software. President Trump tweeted that “You need to be a computer scientist to fly these new planes because they are so complicated. Pilots are no longer needed.” He’s not wrong.
Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, worried deeply about the consequences of his work. But today everybody is moving so fast that we seem to have little time to reflect on the consequences of our great advances.