Artificial Intelligence

Whether we like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is going to make big advances and huge changes to business . I see many wins from it, enabling as it will a productivity advance and a quality advance in many clerical, administrative and analytical functions. It is a greatly enhanced Google Search facility and an improved Microsoft software package with more capacity to help. Like all such big families of invention it will costs us some old jobs but throw up many new ones.

Some worry that it will be used by the criminals and the tyrants for evil purposes. That is of course possible, just as they use current computers and communications systems to try to disrupt our lives, steal from us and threaten us. We will still need a police force in the age of AI, and that force will need to be AI savvy.

I would not leap into legislating to regulate the businesses and create new offences. It is too early to know if that might be needed and what shape it might take . In the meantime be reassured. Theft, fraud, sexual exploitation, terrorism and violence are all against the law. The police can still track and arrest even if they are using some AI as part of their crimes. Using AI will also offer a new way to detect them as use of computers leaves footprints back to the original criminal user.

The issue we should be discussing is why are the world’s three dominant AI/Cloud computing companies all US? It is good news there is lively competition to control costs for the users and drive faster innovation from Microsoft, Alphabet Google and Amazon Web Services. It should alarm the EU and worry us that no large company from this side of the Atlantic is seriously in the game and gaining substantial market share.