It's refreshing to see journalists doing their job properly and probing the marketing platitudes of Silicon Valley's executives to try and unearth the truth.
I watched this BBC 2 programme in full, made many notes and I'm writing a blog on it which I'll share next week. The FT article has summarised a few of the salient points. The protagonist of the programme is former Facebook product manager Antonio Garcia Martinez, who believes that automation will be the downfall of human civilisation. He claims it will destroy jobs and disrupt economies, thereby forcing us to consider redistribution and ensure social safety nets are in place.
Martinez is contentious but offers sage advice. As I've been saying in my Keynote speeches, he refers to the need for AI to be regulated and to ensure it's built for people, rather than simply being in the interest of a small number of wealthy executives on the west coast of America.
The programme ends with Martinez revealing his escape route, and warning us that many Silicon Valley executives have their own bunkers in place in preparation for a potentially dystopian future. How true this actually is, we can't be sure, but it's important to have a balanced view and to keep probing.
"Within 30 years half of humanity won’t have a job." The tech gods "claim to work for the good of humanity...but the social cost of disruption goes much further"
https://www.ft.com/content/bab5c208-78a9-11e7-90c0-90a9d1bc9691