Lots of blah-blah about AI and risk these days. The backlash has begun. Maybe it’s a good thing – or maybe it’s too late. Perhaps the AI agents have jumped out of the bag, beyond the firewall and are running amok. Perhaps we have no idea what they are doing. It’s like people coming into your building to work that you didn’t hire or vet. And they cover their tracks! The latest ‘innovation’ is from that purveyor of invasive software, Meta. Meta, the leading pioneer of personal data misuse and abuse has brought us Muse, which is busy building a dossier on you – what matters to you, what nudges shape your behavior. Cooking up meeting outlines while you cook. Do you trust them with even more of your personal info? Seriously?
AI and risk – let us count the ways – and so MIT did. If you were considering worrying about AI risks, MIT’s Sloan business school has helpfully published a report about the 24 top risks as identified by 272 ‘experts.’ The severity is the same for all. And all spell possible disaster for society (12% likelihood) – “harms that include the potential for more than 1 million deaths, more than $100 billion in financial losses, or comparable civilizational-scale intangible damages.” Whew.
We have heard this song before about technology change. Long ago in the 1990s, research firms like Forrester asserted that “The Internet Changes Everything.” And it did – imagine a world without web browsers, real-time conferences, online interactions with long-distance family, businesses with offices in every corner of the world. Those changes were pretty useful improvements – the end of paper purchase orders was one tiny but helpful change for business.
As with other tech changes – this one will be managed. The risk blah-blah is media-fueled. The reality is that AI is already changing healthcare, and it is in the process of improving senior living and home care. AI deployments in enterprises are underway. Why? Because there aren’t enough people to do all the work – or the work has been redesigned to take advantage of a higher degree of accuracy and efficiency (see radiology). As with previous innovation periods, this one will overcome its ‘Sky is Falling’ period and all will return to work as usual.
