Artificial super intelligence: beyond rhetoric

Excerpt

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere

-Albert Einstein

The new wave of artificial super intelligence raises a number of serious societal concerns: What are the crises and shocks of the AI machine that will trigger fundamental change and how should we cope with the resulting transformation? What would the implication be if AI machine takes over and transforms the way we live and work? What would technology do to work, employment, economy, governance, state, democracy and professions? What would the social and political implications of employment be if people were replaced by the machine? What if the state disappears, and so do economy, professions, employment, politics disappear with it as we know them? Can digital economy be regulated, measured, and controlled? Can the AI machine with its embedded machine learning algorithms be monitored and controlled? Would new politics emerge as another digital game, and what would the rules of this game be, and how would these rules change the playing field of the game of politics itself? Would the nasty form of exploitative individualism triumph or would new forms of digital collectives (e.g. consumer collectives) emerge that would be more powerful than corporations? And can humanity live in a simulated state of digital being? These and many such questions arose during a recent symposium on “Technological Displacement of White-collar Employment: Political and Social Implications” held at Cambridge University (CRASSH 2016). …