The World's A.I. Problems Are Only Going to Get Worse

"If ever there was a time for the people creating technologies to keep in mind the impact of their creations, it's now," my colleague Nick Bilton wrote last year, in the wake of the 2016 election, warning that an influx of new technologies was about to make the Internet's misinformation plague 10 times worse. Bilton's fears have been echoed more recently; in an interview with BuzzFeed News earlier this month, Aviv Ovadya, who predicted the fake-news crisis, said that it's likely to accelerate with the advent of more advanced digital tools able to falsify reality and manipulate perception. "We are so screwed it's beyond what most of us can imagine," he said. "And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse." As modern tech companies struggle to get a handle on extant problems, a new paper authored by 26 technologists, researchers, scientists, and academics, supports the premise that when it comes to new technologies, humankind may be biting off more than it can chew.