• Question: With the limitless power of artificial intelligence to what extent do you believe the world will change from a cosmopolitan society into a dystopian society run predominantly by AI/robots?

    Asked by Ishwinder on 11 Jan 2020. This question was also asked by secretsaudience17.
    • Photo: Andrew Harrison

      Andrew Harrison answered on 11 Jan 2020:

      It’s always hard to predict the future. When I was young there were three TV channels and our TV was black and white. When I was a teenager we got our first video player. When I was at university, a computer science student showed me email – I didn’t get it or see the point. In my mid-20s my girlfriend got a mobile phone and I couldn’t see why she needed it. In the mid-90s I came home from work excited about this new website I’d found – Google – and went to conferences where people would talk about how AI was hype and would never deliver.

      This is just over the last 40 years. I’ve always loved scifi but I couldn’t have predicted the future we have now.

      I’m optimistic and hope we will have a cosmopolitan and equal society in the future but, at the moment, the biggest threat to that isn’t AI, it’s people.

Comments