Week 1 - Surfing the Tsunami

 I’ve always been fascinated by the accelerating development of artificial intelligence sciences.  The expansion of automation has enormous potential to augment (or upend, depending on your perspective) both production and service industries around the globe. While most people still hold deep-seeded Hollywood fears about the advent of true artificial intelligence – examples include “The Matrix” or “The Terminator” – I don’t necessarily see that as the near-term threat.  In reality, the scope of automation will probably have a greater impact on employability, since any job that can be “coded” into a decision matrix can technically be eliminated.

My movie-style fear is more along the lines of the Master Control Program in TRON, but not quite the same cloth.  As machine learning capacity increases, so do our processes for automating business functions.  It’s not unrealistic to think that in the next few decades, think-tank software could be self-developing operational programs which obsolete a huge number of office staff positions. What does a country with a capitalist/consumer economic system do when the majority of its citizen cannot maintain employment or income?



The bottom line is that artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to be a shaping influence in our future.  The extent of such influence is yet to be determined, but I’d wager that it’s going to be one of the defining attributes of the next few decades.  This is a topic we should all be intimately familiar with.

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