If you’re one of the countless people wringing their hands over the prospect of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world, you might want to take a closer look at the kind of world AI is supposedly inheriting.
It’s a world where human flexibility and adaptability are needed more than ever.
AI can outperform humans in various ways but dealing with unrelenting change is not one of them – especially the fevered variety we are now subject to every day.
The stop-go regime of President Donald Trump is a prime example. Just in the week or so preceding the writing of this blog post, the US slapped tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and the European Union, the on-off summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, was apparently on again, and early talks began on a summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But the current occupant of the White House is by no means the only source of the extreme turbulence that is buffeting the world. In Europe, for example, the Brexit negotiations seem to deliver a daily diet of surprises, there are fears that a new governing coalition in Italy will stoke resentment of the country’s eurozone membership, and the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was deposed in a no-confidence vote. The Middle East remains intensely volatile.