AI Challenges: Conclusion

This concludes the series "How AI challenges humanity" for now. We'll continue adding aspects to this series. So subscribe below to get an email when we publish the next article. We plan to write about weapons, automated decision making and privacy next.

State of affairs

There don't seem to be fundamental physical limits that keep the world from reaching general AI. But even so it’s at least a few decades away and it's not even clear which path will lead us there.

Right now there are more immediate threats that need to be addressed fast. Both on a continental and on a global level. In this series of articles we’ve looked at challenges and opportunities in the labor market, around the issue of liability of autonomous systems and dangers in surveillance.

There are many more areas in which a failure to regulate or overregulate will have critical consequences for humanity. Such as AI-powered weapons, text-synthesis in online discourse (we’ve seen nothing yet) and the simple issue of being left behind by one of the other regions. The regions that have distinct data gathering laws and AI research communities seem to be USA/Canada, Europe and China.

The coming years will show which one of those regions is the fastest in developing new tools, the most diligent in drafting regulations and the most cunning in brokering global treaties on AI.