In The Wall Street Journal, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. discusses a wide range of ideas about the speed of artificial intelligence (AI) evolution and how that will affect humanity. One particularly interesting part of his piece is the idea that AI will help humanity avoid mistakes via its radical honesty, as long as, Jenkins later points out, government doesn’t stifle it. He writes:
My guess: The benefits of AI for human decision-making will rapidly suffuse society while the agent revolution—AIs free to act on their own—will be a lot slower in coming. In the war rooms of the future, AIs will pipe up to warn participants when their decision process is being hijacked by an assumption for which no evidence exists—such as that Iran won’t close the Strait of Hormuz or that Ukrainians will bow to a Russian show of force.
In airline cockpits, AIs will monitor data, listen to radio traffic and cockpit conversation, and know when pilots are misreading signals or responding to defective instruments—or engaging in self-destructive behavior (pilot error and pilot suicide being the two major causes of air crashes nowadays).
Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund, is famous for striving to institutionalize “radical honesty” over social hierarchy. Many firms deliberately hold blue-sky sessions where participants are asked to voice ideas they would normally suppress fearing colleague ridicule.
Read more here.
