Why Academics, Developers, And Politicians Must Collaboratively Contemplate AI | Julia Hotz

"If you give a group of tech developers a whiteboard, and ask them to imagine how AI could impact the everyday individual, they’ll likely see a window of opportunities: a road where the drunk “driver” can instead let the car control itself; a sky where drones take unprecedented photographs, manage disaster relief, and spare human causalities from combat; drawers upon drawers of digital file cabinets – within which big data algorithms create customised consumer profiles, publish personalised news updates, and direct both diagnoses in medicine and decisions in law.

Like many Milennials, I feel captivated by these opportunities. From predicting YouTube playlists to asking Siri what the spaces between the prongs of a fork are called (she didn’t know), AI has - on the whole - been a boon to many individuals’ quality-of-life, including my own.

But if you invite academics to the “whiteboard”, they’ll probably sketch a darker projection – one that postulates a not-so-unlikely scenario: what if AI gets in the hands of the wrong people?

Such was the subject of “The Malicious Use of AI” - a recently published 100-page report, written by 26 emerging tech experts..."