FUTURE SOCIETIES
SARAH WILD: Flesh and blood may be our salvation in rise of the machines
‘The greatest threat machines and artificial intelligence pose isn’t that they will become smarter than us’
The machines are coming. This is not a drill. Nor is it the script of a movie. The vanguard has already infiltrated and yet we remain unprepared for it. We cannot answer the questions: will a machine take my job? What dangers do these machines pose to society? What should we study if we want to be employable in 20 years? And it isn’t just in SA, although we seem to be acutely unable to see the wood for the trees. A study by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, published in the prestigious journal Nature, has found that the economic giant is not prepared either. "Policy makers are flying blind into what has been called the fourth industrial revolution," write study chairmen Tom Mitchell and Erik Brynjolfsson in an accompanying op-ed. "There is a dramatic shortage of information and data about the exact state of the workforce and automation, so policy makers don’t know answers to even basic questions such as which types of technologies are currently having t...
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