Podcast: Immortality or a robot apocalypse? What is our tech future?

Rebecca Parsons, CTO of global tech consultancy company Thoughtworks, asked: If we are building intelligent systems, why do we think we’re not eventually going to build a system that is more intelligent than we are?

Media narratives around these hypothetical super-intelligent systems are either dystopian or utopian. They will want to harm us or these systems will be benevolent and give us long lives of leisure, perhaps even immortality.

While loom smashing Luddite thinking doesn’t seem reasonable, neither does technological utopianism, said Rebecca who added that technology is not a panacea.

“That’s just not the case [that technology can solve all our problems]. That doesn’t say technology doesn’t have a role to play or doesn’t have impacts, but on the other hand, we don’t want people thinking about tech dystopianism. We don’t want people thinking about how everything is wrong [because of technology] … we shouldn’t have Luddites.”

“Technology does have a role to play even though technology has resulted in all kinds of things: It’s worsening inequality, pollution, environmental collapse.”

This kind of black and white thinking is already applied to current technologies so Rebecca said we need a good dose of technological pragmatism going forward. Technological advances bring good, bad and okay things.

“We’ve got to mitigate the risks and occasionally things go horribly wrong and we need to be aware of that,” she added.

But sometimes it’s difficult to know what is ‘okay’. Autonomous trucks, for example, sound like a good idea in terms of more efficient delivery windows but what becomes of the truck stop and the micro economy it supports?

The responsible tech movement is tackling these problems and Thoughtworks has developed its own Responsible Tech Playbook as a guide with topics like bias and unconscious bias. “We have to get out of our own heads. If you have employees building technology for you, chances are they had a pretty privileged existence to have that level of education.”

Rebecca Parsons, CTO of Thoughtworks, was speaking on the SaaS Monster stage at Web Summit 2021.

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Main image: Web Summit