From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Online trolling and abuse is a real problem now. A lot of people who want to express an opinion now are fearful that they'll get piled-on. And there's no real immunity from it.
Criminals are not looking for challenges, but opportunities. Every breach I've been involved with comes down to the fact that someone in the company did something they weren't supposed to or failed to do something they should have done.
About ten years, a guy told me about his father's death. He had to send twenty seven people on different buses and trains to inform relatives all over the country because phones didn't work. When his mother died, there were STD/PCO facilities in most-all villages. He had to only make twenty seven calls, and they were all informed in under half an hour.
My fear has never been the machines waking up and deciding to do away with us, but rather that we- in our own bone headed way- deploy systems inappropriately, or without thinking through the unintended consequences that may occur.
The internet has a natural pressure to bubble us up and vulcanise society, it makes it less comfortable for us to be around people who think differently, and more comfortable to be around people who think the same as us.
Whether it's real-life viruses, or dangerous ideas, they tend to be spread by super spreaders. We know that 20% of infected people do 80% of the spreading of COVID-19. We also know that on Facebook, there is a relatively identifiable cohort of super spreaders of disinformation and misinformation.
Just think about what happens when the next billion people come online, and the next two billion after that. It's a remarkable thing to consider.
I have grey hair, I'm 64. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. When I grew-up, I never worried about nuclear war, global pandemic, technology destroying jobs, climate change destroying the world, or stable democracies being taken over by authoritarian extremists.
Technology isn't a 'thing,' it's a social structure that people act upon the universe through. The social structure has incentives, roles and governance which determine the meaning and effect of the technology, not the engineering itself.
Deep fakes in terms of a true deep fake, you do not even know if this is Barack Obama speaking or if this is a synthetic Barack Obama. There are ways to detect that today, and we think that we can discern otherwise. That's quickly going to fall, but already the minute changes that can manipulate perception are terrifying.
That's the future of medicine… being able to see a doctor before something happens, not after… seeing a doctor when you need to, not on some random annual check-up day once a year. Data can create a real story for how the body is evolving and what's happening right at this very moment.
The workplace of the future is hard to predict specifically, but one thing we can predict is that we will increasingly rely on human intelligence and creativity as opposed to human capacity to perform repetitive tasks.