Management, technology, random thoughts
There have been warnings for many years about the potential for disaster with Artificial Intelligence implementations. Many luminaries, from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, have warned about the implications if we unwittingly create a robotic overlord who deems that we are irrelevant at best and destructive at worst, and decides the world will be better off without us.
So why am I concerned now, and should you be?
I don’t know how many times this has come up in conversations with staff members and mentees over the years, but it’s been quite a few. “I’m too busy to take a course..”; “My manager won’t let me study.”; “I would have to do the study in my personal time..”; “The tools are too difficult to use.”. I don’t have time to learn.
I sympathise with anyone who feels tremendously time-poor, for often valid reasons, but the above comments, and variants of them, feel like excuses.
On the day of my daughter’s 15th birthday I stood in the cold in the local churchyard with her, and well more than a hundred others, and waited for the body of her best friend’s father to arrive.
A very private man, I had met him only once, and didn’t know him at all. Despite his private nature the crowd of people there was testament to the impact he had on many lives. We were there to offer our support and consolation to his family, and to say goodbye to a brother, husband, father, co-worker and friend. While we waited there, I thought that while it may not be obvious to us as we travel through our lives, the decisions we make have lasting consequences, and those consequences live beyond us.