From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
While people have been worried about AI being embedded in humanoid robots from the science fiction world, our lives have been shaped and influenced by AI which makes tens of billions of decisions each day about what we see, and how we communicate.
From around 2007 onwards, a new era dawned, marked by the widespread adoption of smartphones, essentially equipping every person with a sensor device. In tandem, social media platforms proliferated, facilitating incessant information sharing. Concurrently, Google services like Earth and Street View began to provide unprecedented access to geospatial data, granting us both the means and the method to verify a plethora of information.
There are a lot of people who misuse social media and then they pay the price for it. These individuals and groups are hunting for people to make mistakes, take embarrassing videos and show the world.
I would describe games as an art form centred around systems. Viewing the world as a system means perceiving it as a collection of interconnected elements. These elements interact in a way that both enables and restricts themselves and each other.
We didn't just make technology, it made us. In the modern context, this phenomenon terrifies some people and excites others- but it's going to happen. We have to understand how humans and their tools and technologies blend at scale – it's going to be an absolutely fascinating journey.
For instance, while AI can generate images that appear real, it cannot create convincing backgrounds that can be geolocated, since they do not correspond to actual places.
The discipline I worked in was called SETI- The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Of course, that latter word is a misnomer. We don't know how to define intelligence or detect it at a distance. What we have done is to use technology as a proxy for intelligence- and therefore we have been looking for evidence of someone else's technology.
When I entered the telecom scene in India, in the early nineteen eighties, we had two million telephones for seven hundred and fifty million people. It used to take fifteen years to get a telephone connection. In a very short space of time, just twenty five years, we have seven hundred and fifty million telephones. We are adding ten million every month, month after month, and for the first time in the history of India- we are a connected nation of over a billion people.
We have become robots, instead of humans with feelings… with conversations… with letter writing, you know.
Over this 99.9% of human existence, when technology advances, population advances and counterbalances any potential increase in human prosperity. Suddenly once technological progress reaches a tipping point, families start to invest in education, they economise on the number of children, and technological progress is converted into richer people rather than into more people.
Kodak had been living in linear-time, something which is intuitive to most of us, where we think in days, weeks, months, years… The world had already started to shift when people like Steve Jobs started to take-advantage of the fact that you could connect the dots.
In the 21st century, there are cameras everywhere except for where our food and energy come from, and where our waste goes. We are the most powerful species in the world, but we remain blind to the fundamentals that allow us to survive. How are we blind to our life support system?