PHOENIX–There are six conversations around technology that every credit union management team needs to have—some are wonderous, some are scary, and some could go either or both ways.
Nick Thompson, editor in chief of Wired, told CO-OP’s THINK 18 Conference here that technology is making life “better,” but “there are choices we need to make now” at a point where computers are surpassing humans in intelligence.
To that end, Thompson said the six conversations, or questions, credit unions and the world at large need to have are:
What the Hell is Happening to the Technology Industry Right Now?
According to Thompson, there are four “critiques” that are “converging like four tributaries coming together in a raging river.” The four are:
Addiction. “There is a real sense that our phones aren’t helping us lead better lives. They pull us in. They are designed to suck us in, and it’s frustrating. There’s a sense that these devices should have given us better lives, but that we have been made poorer, not richer. It’s a paradox. We have this capacity, but it’s making us do things we regret.”
Privacy. “The business model has been that ‘We will take what was private about you and monetize it.’ And we didn’t care about that for about 15 years. And then the dam broke with the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal. We realized our personal data is being used to manipulate our democracy.”
Power. “Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook are the five most powerful companies in the world. They have infinite information about what’s happening in the world. If I create a social network that starts to do well, they will know about it before I do. Their power has made people nervous and there is no good solution to it.”
Anger. “The 2016 Election had a big effect. Silicon Valley is 95% Democrat. The idea that Donald Trump could win really shocked Silicon Valley and made it nervous. The anger and vitriol now have a lot of people thinking democracy isn’t working.”
How Will Algorithms Change the Way We Communicate?
“This is something we don’t think enough about,” said Thompson.
He pointed to a new Instagram tool that allows users to get rid of any word they choose. But the company itself is also using artificial intelligence to analyze the content of a sentence or a paragraph to determine if it’s mean or nice, to peer into the sentiment of the syntax.
“Now there is a system at Instagram where anything you say that is mean disappears, except on your feed. Google also is building a similar system, and Facebook will probably implement something. Soon we will have all sorts of conversations that are mediated by algorithms. Think about the implications for free speech.”
Will We Have Jobs in the Future?
This is an issue that frightens many people, including those within credit unions who wonder if their own positions won’t be eliminated. Thompson said there are three ways to look at this issue.
Scenario one:“Your calculator has always been better at math than you. But now the number of tasks where your computer is better than you now are growing. We will get to point where there is nothing a computer isn’t better at than humans. The number-one employer of males in the U.S. involve driving, and now we have self-driving vehicles.”
Scenario two. “This scenario says it’s a little more complicated than that. ATMs made banking better, and now the number of tellers we have is more than in the 1980s when ATMs were invented, although some say that number will not decline. We think it’s going to be OK.
Scenario three: “In this view, it’s going to be totally fine because it always has been fine. We have been stressed about losing jobs to machines since the early 1900s. I’m probably somewhere between scenario two and three.”
How Will We Determine Truth?
Thompson pointed to the innumerable examples of how people have been fooled by fake texts and fake news, and now the world is about to be introduced to widespread “fake video.” As an example, he showed a video of President Obama speaking in which Obama made a number of inflammatory statements. But the screen then split to show Obama continuing to “speak” but the source of the words was actually comedian Jordan Peele in a spot-on impression.
“We get bamboozled by fake texts and fake emails from our financial institutions, and now we have the capacity to create fake videos,” said Thompson. “And then think of how we are going to be manipulated in artificial reality. The possibilities for manipulation are nuts. Yes, we’ll have better technology for identifying it, maybe blockchain. But we are entering a crazy period of identification and verification.”
So, What Are the Biggest Questions and How is America Doing
The questions Thompson said he finds most interesting for discussion now include:
- What if there isn’t a human in the loop? “This is an interesting moral question, especially in the military or medical decisions.”
- What if the underlying data is biased?
- Will it make society less equal? “Technology should make everything equal, but that isn’t what happened. The tech revolution hasn’t had a great effect on income distribution.”
- Will it lead to ever-worse monopolies? “Google already controls all search. All the best AI people are working at the same companies.”
What are the Limits to How Tech is Changing Us?
Thompson said Wired’s editorial staff set out to investigate this very issue, and what it found is that tech is changing how people are born, how they live, who lives, and how they die.
“It’s changing at every level in ways that are profoundly exciting and also in ways that will totally reshape society,” he said. “For instance, we are in a moment where we will soon have the capacity to take adult cells and turn it into an egg or sperm and then create an embryo. We’re not that far off. What does that mean? It means people who are infertile can have babies, that’s great. It means if they have died and left DNA, it means they can have children. It also means one person can have their own kid. We are getting to the point where we do that, and where we can modify the child a little bit, prevent diseases, yes, but also make them a little smarter, stronger.”
And where does Thompson stand on all this change and the questions that need to be asked?
“Things are getting better,” he said. “But there are choices to make now that will have huge consequences later.”