Create a Better World - Not Better AI Agents

Google is playing a slightly different hand, looking at world models - AI that can construct worlds, understand relationships within them, identify patterns and explore different pathways. Then of course, Mark Zuckerberg published his futures manifesto in the Wall Street Journal this week - his vision of a world that appears to languish comfortably in his own reality, not so much in ours.

So exciting times - right? The technological takeover is here - a global construct run by agents designed by billionaires while we passively twiddle our thumbs on the side line.

Trouble is, we shouldn’t be even considering a tech takeover. What we should be doing is putting on our thinking caps and deciding what sort of world we actually want.

We are holding on to old patterns and old structures that served the world before now - a world that no longer exists today. We should focus our attention on determining what kind of world we want in the future and how available technology might support us to design, construct, and live in that world. A world which I hope will provide greater equity. The problem is that those who hold the technology and those who currently hold power have a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they are.

But if I said to you, design the world you want to live in? How would it look? What would it feel like? Who would benefit? What would we be doing? That’s where we need to focus but, of course, it is a much harder question to address.

Almost every discussion about AI assumes today’s institutions, today’s organisations and today’s ways of working are fixed. We ask how AI might improve public relations, communication, healthcare, education, government or the law. We rarely stop to ask whether those systems are still the right ones - if they ever were.

If you could design the world you wanted to live in, what would it look like?

How would people work? How would communities make decisions? How would healthcare be delivered? How would education prepare young people for lives that don’t yet exist? How would organisations earn trust? How would technology distribute opportunity rather than concentrate power? What are the great examples of social good, equity and justice? What should we leave behind in terms of process and practice?

It is only after answering those questions we can begin to question the role AI might play. And it should play a role. The technology is incredible but it is not infallible. It is efficient but it is not empathetic. And left to its own devices it is destructive, not productive.

We cleave to structures and practices that belong to another era. We use extraordinary technology to reinforce archaic assumptions, nineteenth and twentieth-century institutions and economic models that serve only those who already hold power, busily building data centres - the coal mines of the 21st century - to feed their needy greed.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve seen the results of the worst extreme weather people can experience. So many places in the world are on fire - the world is, quite literally, burning beneath us. And in places where it’s not burning, it’s flooding.

So again, I ask the question, what do we want to do? We only have one world. We have a finite set of resources. Those resources could be shared equally and we could all be better off but, as we know, they’re not.

Election cycles are looming again across much of the world and none of us need AI to detect the familiar pattern of selfish leadership, where the common good is too often sacrificed on the altar of self-interest. Many of those standing for election - across geographies and cultures - are not interested in a world of good, rather their own world construct of power and position. There are pockets of good intent - cheap bus fares here, a challenge to blatant corruption there - but for the most part, and for me at least, many election posters call to mind the gargoyles of ancient times, their vices and sins oozing over the edges of the flying buttresses.