PRISM 8, NO. 3 It seems like we are continuously bombarded with prophecies about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and all of its permutations— from quantum computing and machine learning to RPA and Skynet—will radically change just about everything we do.1 However, much of its potential (whether as promise or pariah) remains prospective, more speculative than real. That is especially true with regard to the impact of AI on organizations and those who lead them, and given the title of Brigette Hyacinth’s work, The Future of Leadership: The Rise of Automation, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, this reviewer was hopeful that it would contribute more to the discussion. Unfortunately, while it lays a foundation for that discussion, it does little to further it, especially for those who must lead in the public sphere. The book itself has three main parts, ostensibly connected by the challenges of AI and what to do about it. The first part is an extensive catalog of those challenges, with the author opting for breadth rather than depth. Thus, the reader is treated to list after list of AI applications, ranging from the way we work (and work out) to the way we drive and eat and sleep. In so doing, the author proffers a paradox; that is, that this particular technology—like so many others—is very much a “two-edged” sword, making lives easier but bringing with it threats anticipated and otherwise. And when it comes down to where AI falls on that promise-to-peril continuum, the author is clearly on the “Danger, Will Robinson!” end of the scale. Thus, despite chronicling all the benefits of AI, she predicts that it will ultimately cause the massive (indeed, historic) displacement of people as its principal consequence, with many millions of us left without meaningful work, our hard-earned skills and education rendered obsolete by faceless governments and corporations looking to cut costs at all cost. I have a different, less pessimistic view; that is, that we will muddle through . . . that technologies like AI will emerge and advance as they always do, usually with unplanned, unanticipated, and even unimagined consequences. Take the advent of the smart phone and the internet—both are significant in their own right, affecting the way we live our lives and even how we fight our wars—but taken together, they have produced culture-changing phenomena like social media that many of us never saw coming. However, we adapted to those (for better or worse) as we always do, and I am not yet convinced that AI is so fundamentally different that it will have the economic and societal equivalent of an asteroid strike. In the author’s gloomy future, this mass displacement spares no country, developed or developing. It will be global, its impact so pervasive that the author wonders how all of those unand underemployed workers will afford the goods that AI produces for them. This leads to an extended (and in my view, seemingly out of place) discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of Universal Basic Income, something the author clearly disdains but believes may be the only solution to the survival
Last spring, Google announced that it would not partner with the Department of Defense’s “Project Maven,” which sought to harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve intelligence collection and targeting. Google’s corporate culture, which one employee characterized as “don’t be evil,” attracted a number of employees who were opposed to any arrangement where their research would be applied to military and surveillance applications. As a result, Google had to choose between keeping these talented and skilled employees and losing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts. Google chose the former.1 In fact, a number of AI-related organizations and researchers have signed a “Lethal Autonomous Weapons Pledge” that expressly prohibits development of machines that can decide to take a human life.2
