We live in an age in which intersecting crises are being lifted to a global scale, with unseen levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and climate destabilization, as well as new surges in populism, conflict, economic uncertainty, and mounting public health threats. All are crises that are slowly tipping the balance, questioning our business-as-usual economic model of the past decades, and requiring us to rethink our next steps. In the next few months, we will once again witness a gathering of verbal diarrhea in Scotland all promising to go green. There is no doubting in the last few decades that we humans have achieved advances away beyond what our ancestors would have believed possible. The irony is that to survive we have to become something very different from what we are.

Artificial Intelligence might be a term for collecting concepts that allow computer systems to vaguely work like a brain. However, the use of numbers to represent complex social reality is flawed. AI might seem factual and precise when it isn't as the results that AI produces depend on how it is designed and what data it uses. At the moment in our everyday world, AI performs narrow tasks such as facial recognition, natural language processing, or internet searches but the pace of its progress is exponential and regardless of its benefits. The impact it is having is hard to ignore with more and more of the world's commerce becoming automated and trading going online.

There are a lot of things that can go and have gone wrong throughout history -- earthquakes and wars and plagues and whatnot. The present state of our planet does not have to be highlighted by me in this post but a major change is coming, over unknown timescales but across every segment of society, and the people playing a part in that transition have a huge responsibility and opportunity to shape it for the best. What is triggering this change? Although most of us are unaware of it, AI systems are everywhere, from bank apps that let us deposit checks with a picture, to everyone's favorite Snapchat filter, to our handheld mobile assistants. While many countries' laws are deficient in terms of artificial intelligence ("AI") – which is defined as the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems and other machines,should we ignore the risks of any technology and not take precautions?