One of the essential phrases necessary to understand AI in 2019 has to be "ethics washing." Put simply, ethics washing -- also called "ethics theater" -- is the practice of fabricating or exaggerating a company's interest in equitable AI systems that work for everyone. A textbook example for tech giants is when a company promotes "AI for good" initiatives with one hand while selling surveillance capitalism tech to governments and corporate customers with the other. Accusations of ethics washing have been lobbed at the biggest AI companies in the world, as well as startups. The most high-profile example this year may have been Google's external AI ethics panel, which devolved into a PR nightmare and was disbanded after about a week.

When technology and human ingenuity gets together, everybody in society profits. If you look at graphs of GDP / capita over long time periods (850 years), the trend is always upwards. The only things that drag this progress down are severe periods of sickness (like the black death) and widespread war (such as WW2). Overall though, technology makes everyone healthier and richer. At this point in our society's history – technology has never been more important to the global economy.