Many commentators about the future are fascinated by the role of AI or artificial intelligence; but often they forget that some kind of corporation or business entity will actually have to build it.
Indeed, the role of business, the role of the actual provider of the AI of the future is sadly neglected – and yet it is critical importance. The AI of the future will not come out of thin air. It will come out of a giant tech corporation – a tech corporation that will probably not welcome the wrong kind of questions.
Today we see the vice-like grip the tech sector has over the US Congress, to such a degree it more or less has a veto over any legislation designed to regulate it. This does not augur well, considering that in the future the tech sector will have even more influence than it does now.
It seems likely that the extent and reach of a handful of tech corporations will continue to grow in the future. Tech providers will actually be able to understand the content of our voice calls, will know more and more about us, as more of our lives move on-line.
Yet there promises to be almost no democratic accountability in the future. Decisions will be taken without oversight, on the basis of commercial advantage, not what might be in the interests of the general good.
In my book 'Some Time In The Future' I posit the existence of only one tech provider, called Avocado. Avocado is furtive, but benign. But this of course is only one scenario. There might be several companies all vying with each other, in which commercial advantage is everything. Alternatively there might be a kind of 'co-opertition', in which they agree only to compete in ways which benefit each other.
But whatever form the tech providers of the future might take, it is unlikely they will act in in anything other than their own interests. They will have massive funds with which to influence legislators; they will resist any attempts at oversight or inspection; and they will have massive control and access to users' data.
Should domestic house robots ever become a reality, or even humanoid robots in the workplace, these too will be huge sources of data about the lives of those humans around them. If you actually had a domestic house robot which made your bed and cooked your dinner (which technically is not that far away) the tech corporations supplying this equipment would effectively have a window into your life. What it would do with all that data is of course open to question, but it raises immense questions, and it is uncertain how much legislation will be able to influence things.
The total data sequencing of our entire lives seems quite possible, at some time in the future. Whether this data will be put to good uses or bad uses remains to be seen – though of course it will be grist to the mill of any totalitarian regime.
Perhaps we had better hope that the tech providers of the future are benign, like Avocado is in my book. A combination of immense size, the ever deepening and extending reach of the tech giants, and a lack of oversight may make that hope a very pious one indeed.