 According to Cave, what issue does AI development share with climate change threats?
The Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI. Stephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Climate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided. One of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future. One of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost.
 Those in charge of climate change threats and AI don't experience societal costs sustained from negative outcomes
 Western industries rely too much on certain materials and technology to abandon use of AI and things like fossil fuels  Those in charge of climate change threats and AI don't experience societal costs sustained from negative outcomes  They inevitably contribute to a widening income disparity among the wealthy and those living in poverty  At a certain point, AI and responses to climate change will eradicate job positions that many humans currently fill