Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Serious AI Challenges that Require Our Attention

Several weeks ago Vanity Fair published and article by NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, - Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the AI Apocalypse.  “Elon Musk is famous for his futuristic gambles, but Silicon Valley’s latest rush to embrace artificial intelligence scares him,” noted Dowd.  “And he thinks you should be frightened too.”

Entrepreneur and inventor Elon Musk is one of a number of world-renowned technologists and scientists who have expressed serious concerns that AI might be an existential threat to humanity, a group that includes Stephen Hawking, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Gates.  But, the vast majority of AI experts do not share their fears.  A few months ago, Stanford University’s One Hundred Year Study of AI project published a report by a panel of experts assessing the current state of AI.  Their overriding finding was that:

“Contrary to the more fantastic predictions for AI in the popular press, the Study Panel found no cause for concern that AI is an imminent threat to humankind.  No machines with self-sustaining long-term goals and intent have been developed, nor are they likely to be developed in the near future.  Instead, increasingly useful applications of AI, with potentially profound positive impacts on our society and economy are likely to emerge between now and 2030, the period this report considers.  At the same time, many of these developments will spur disruptions in how human labor is augmented or replaced by AI, creating new challenges for the economy and society more broadly.”

Just because experts conclude that, - at least for the foreseeable future, - AI does not pose an imminent threat to humanity, doesn’t mean that such a powerful technology isn’t accompanied by serious challenges that require our attention.

Is Blockchain the Major Next Step in the Evolution of the Internet?

In the Fall of 1995, IBM made the decision to embrace the Internet and make it the centerpiece of its strategic directions.  As the general manager of the newly formed IBM Internet Division, I spent a lot of time thinking how to best articulate the promise of the Internet.  Looking back, I often described that promise using some variation of: The Internet has the potential to transform the economy, society and our personal lives.

It’s taken a a few additional innovations, - e.g., smartphones, social media, cloud computing, big data, IoT, - for its historical impact to be fully evident, but by now, most everyone agrees that the Internet has become one of the most transformative technologies the world has ever seen, - right up there with electricity, telecommunications, cars and airplanes.

About a year ago, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published its annual list of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies for 2016, and named The Blockchain as one of the technologies in the 2016 list.  The WEF report compared the blockchain to the Internet, noting that “Like the Internet, the blockchain is an open, global infrastructure upon which other technologies and applications can be built.  And like the Internet, it allows people to bypass traditional intermediaries in their dealings with each other, thereby lowering or even eliminating transaction costs.”

As Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott wrote in the opening paragraph of their recently published book  Blockchain Revolution, “It appears that once again, the technological genie has been unleashed from its bottle.  Summoned by an unknown person or persons with unclear motives, at an uncertain time in history, the genie is now at our service for another kick of the can - to transform the economic power grid and the old order of human affairs for the better.  If we will it.”

Become a More Productive, Empathetic, Creative Person With the Help of AI-Based Tools

Despite dramatic advances in technology, most of the world’s economies have been stuck in a long period of slow growth and slow productivity.  This is one of the most serious challenges in our 21st century economy.  Opinions abound, but there’s little consensus on its causes, and, nobody seems to know what to do about it, or how long it will likely last, - years or decades. 

In a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, MIT Research Fellow Michael Schrage proposed a provocative and counterintuitive approach for enhancing innovation and productivity through man-machine collaborations.  Schrage’s approach has been more influenced by behavioral economics than by technology or algorithmic advances.  Instead of just asking how can people create more valuable innovation?, why not also ask How can innovation create more valuable people?  Don’t just leverage advanced technologies, - e.g., bots, software agents, and digital assistants, - to automate away a large portion of the workforce, but also focus on enhancing innovation and productivity by leveraging technology to create higher-performance versions of employees.

“Designing and training smarter algorithms may be cheaper and easier than retraining smart people,” wrote Schrage.  “Advocates of autonomous systems and machine learning typically innovate to minimize or marginalize human involvement in business processes.  For them, people are part of the problem, not the solution.  Organizations that take productivity seriously, however, understand that false dichotomies make poor investments: Smarter machines can - and should - be keys to unlocking greater returns from human capital.”

Mobile Payments - a Long, Relentless War of Attrition

Apple Pay was launched in September of 2014.  It was positioned as a relatively easy, secure way to pay for purchases in physical stores as well as online using a variety of supported Apple devices including iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watch. The general reaction to Apple’s announcement was quite positive:  “[F]or now, at least, analysts believe if there is any company to persuade consumers of the mobile wallet’s value, it is Apple.” 

The payments community welcomed Apple with open arms, hoping that Apple could play a major role in bringing together the different players in the fragmented payments ecosystem, much as it had previously done with iTunes for music and the App Store for smartphone apps.  Apple Pay embraced a number of industry standards, including NFC (near-field communications) for contact-less payments; secure element, a dedicated device chip; and network-based tokenization to protect sensitive financial data.  In addition, Apple collaborated with the credit card networks, several banks and a number of merchants in the development and deployment of Apple Pay, as well as publishing the APIs so developers could embed Apple Pay services in their own apps.  

“Say hello to Apple Pay. It’s the new kid on the payments block and, depending on how things unfold, it could be the new Gorilla in the mobile payments ecosystem,” wrote Karen Webster, CEO of Market Platform Dynamics and an expert in digital payments.  But, she also added a prescient note of caution: “As great as this sounds, there are two limitations of Apple Pay right now for consumers and merchants.  And it’s that old chicken and egg issue that gets in the way of every new payments system.”  The chicken and egg issue is that there aren’t enough consumer devices supporting Apple Pay, and there aren’t enough merchants that accept it.  Both, consumers and merchants, have to be convinced to move away from payment systems they know well and feel comfortable with.