Artificial Intelligence: An inhumane future?

This week I was invited to speak at the Oxford Union in England on the topic: AI: An inhumane future? In this panel there was Kenneth Cukier, a senior editor of The Economist, D Catherine Havasi, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist and Professor Sir Adrian Smith, the director of The Alan Turing Institute. As I was preparing for this talk, I was reminded of the famous British author Charles Dickens who in his classic novel, A Tale of Two Cities, famously characterised the French Revolution as follows: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." Artificial Intelligence (AI) is catalysing another revolution and not the French one…but the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). While the French revolution ushered new improved ways of human relations, it also ushered the cruelty of political factions.