Top 10 Players We Should Worry About Shaping the Near-term Direction of AI

What can we predict about the future of AI? That things will be unpredictable.

We'll likely see an explosion of entrepreneurship with new businesses emerging to solve problems we haven't even considered. These businesses will disrupt industries and displace multi-billion dollar incumbents. It's just hard to know which ones. There will be a new set of externalities we haven't considered, and we'll be forever playing catch up to balance innovation with regulation.

There are some things, though, that we can see coming and maybe, just maybe want to get out in front of.

A set of usual suspects are poised to leverage the technology in some predictable ways. These are the trains on the tracks headed straight for us, and while SkyNet dystopian futures grab the headlines, we need to be taking more aggressive action to guide this ship in the nearer term.

Top 10 Players We Should Worry About Shaping the Near-term Direction of AI:

1. Big Tech Who Profit from the Attention Economy: Kind of a no-brainer. Eyeball monetization is the dominant model for almost all of the big tech players; no doubt they will double-down on capturing ad revenue, competing for users' attention and manipulating our buying behavior. We're only now realizing the societal effects of the attention economy (epidemic levels of loneliness, depression, and anxiety; political polarization, etc.). While we make product companies and drug companies clear safety hurdles and we age-gate other harmful products and activities, we've largely let Big Tech police themselves. They reap rewards while a hooked set of users foots the bill. As we transition from the curative to the generative phase of AI, expect the same only more.
2. Political Campaigns (and the Duopoly): Gone are the days when politicians targeted undecided voters. Campaigns are really good at micro-targeting and mobilizing the base. They've figured out how to maximize outrage with the resulting system serving the duopoly more than it serves citizens. Prepare for exponential advancements when it comes to tapping into voters' worst and basest instincts. Prepare for even more division, more populist movements, and more uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners where you don't want to get Uncle Fred started. Yes, things can and will get worse!
3. Big Finance: These are the Bros who make ungodly amounts of money taking big risks by exploiting market inefficiencies and/ or manipulating markets with little personal accountability for the downside. Expect flash crashes, meme-driven bank runs, and other weird behavior as AI shortens cycles and automates more and more decisions.
4. Nation States: Since the advent of language, governments have waged propaganda campaigns. Buckle up. AI provides massive new capabilities to influence citizens and perceived enemies' citizens. The Orwellian present will continue, elections will be under further siege, and we'll all be wondering how to sort out the competing realities. Nation states will be deploying more and more sophisticated bots to identify cracks in a country's foundation and do what they can to turn them into chasms.
5. Fringe Groups: Every crackpot with a phone has the ability to recruit and radicalize at scale. We've been in a gun fight against these elements, and the fringe groups are trading in their knives for bazookas. So... expect an explosion of crackpots and fringe groups. The misinformation campaigns and indoctrination will be mind-blowing.
6. The Military Industrial Complex: AI will set off a number of un-winnable races to the bottom, not the least of which will be for military dominance. The nuclear arms race will feel like an appetizer compared to what's coming, with decisions and expenditures justified as "necessary to defend against foreign adversaries." Chip wars and trade wars and cyber wars will all be informed and powered by AI.
7. Big Spam: I came across a study that showed the considerable ROI of sending out 35 million spam emails to generate 28 actual sales. Another example of one actor capturing the gain without having to deal with the real costs. Expect the spam/ robocall/ bot onslaught to grow at an exponential rate. Unsubscribing will be like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: by the time you're finished, your inbox will be full. Beyond technical competence, these marketers are great at shutting down entities and standing up new ones in far-off places to evade anti-spam laws and subsequent fines.
8. Big Porn: The porn industry had a lot to do with early internet expansion, the move to broadband, and refinements in search and video. Not a huge leap to assume it will be an early mover in the generative AI and Metaverse space. I expect we'll also see a plethora of AI "companions" hit the market with far-ranging "capabilities." We're already seeing people marry later, have fewer children, and deal with considerable loneliness and anxiety. I'm not sure these "companions" will be part of the cure.
9. Big Phishing: With deep fakes and the like, we should prepare for Nigerian Princes on Steroids. But this will not be your grandparents' Nigerian Prince email with misspellings and other tell-tale signs. Expect to hear your children's voice pleading for ransom money, your bank making a courtesy call to verify you weren't hacked and other scams built to fool even the savviest of people. Not sure there's a hot enough place in hell for these vermin.
10. Big Gaming: Gambling used to be the domain of Vegas, Atlantic City and numbers-running bookies. Fast forward to today and we've normalized it to the point that you can in-game bet on a D-II college softball players' pitch count with the touch of your thumb. Much of what we know about dopamine and addiction comes from gambling research. The casinos were early with big data and predictive models that helped them intervene when gamblers (aka potential addicts) were about to walk away. Now, they get to leverage AI for further expansion and gain. I'm sure that will add a richness to all of our lives.

Pretty cynical list. It doesn't have to be this way. While the market will determine winners and losers, we have some ability to shape direction and ensure more winners align with human values. Opportunities are everywhere for significant, life-changing good... but businesses will take the quickest path to financial gain.

There's some decent momentum now in putting appropriate guard-rails in place, but many of the players referenced above have become quite adept at weaponizing their influence, preventing theoretical discussions from ever actually infringing on their ability to exploit market opportunity. That's not a judgement. It's what industries do. We should expect them to behave that way.

Regulation is a tough dance. We can't stifle innovation and we can't fight the last war. This is a pressing national and global conversation. We need guidelines and protocols for how we deploy AI that enhances human well-being, not just lines the pockets of the few. We need to demand a level of interpretability while aggressively closing the gap between human wisdom and technical capability. And we need to be much more thoughtful with incentives, looking at AI regulation through the lens of business model and monetization, not just the latest symptom.

That last paragraph feels like a bit of a pollyanna word salad. Let me simplify. There are smart people working on this. In the end, there's an urgent need to come together, make some decisions, and give those decisions teeth. If we don't, we can in fact predict the near-term future.