A Digital Monoculture Is a Bigger Threat Than the Terminator Scenario

[Commentary] While Waze leads us to our destinations via the quickest route, our dependence on this kind of decision-support system may also be the quickest route to a monocultural society. As Artificial Intelligence and machine learning improve, more people are going to benefit, and through our interaction with the machines, the AI systems will make better decisions for us and in turn become more and more popular. And then it will happen: a small number of AI systems (most likely the aforementioned "Partnership on AI" group) will be making most of our decisions for us. We might not even notice that in the process, we devolved our diverse, multicultural world into a collection of distinct digital monocultures. AI will sort our news feeds (it already does), our entertainment choices (it already does), our way-finding (it already does), and the energy efficiency of our homes and offices (it already can, but it is not widely deployed); make our financial decisions (it mostly does); make our medical decisions; make our business decisions; and probably make our political decisions too. The list of potential AI applications is bounded only by need and imagination.

[Shelly Palmer is President & CEO of Palmer Advanced Media]