Two and a half years ago, President Obama called on the FCC to classify broadband internet as a utility. It joined a small club that you know well: electricity, gas, and running water. And now this club may be welcoming yet another new member. Is artificial intelligence the newest utility?
Are we witnessing the dawn of AI being as ubiquitous as running water?Six years ago, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen wrote that “software is eating the world.” Well, now AI is eating software.
You know the times are changing when AI is going from the subject of science fiction to the subject of an organization like the Financial Stability Board. That’s a global organization of central bankers who are responsible for the security of the world’s banking system. This is a critical task when we are facing an epidemic of data breaches.
Consider the attack that happened last February, when hackers managed to withdraw over $100 million from a Bangladesh bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The fraudsters used malware to compromise a computer network, observed how transfers were done, and gained access to the bank’s credentials. This is a new kind of stealing in the digital age, where a heist of eight figures can happen in an instant, all with the unseen movement of 1s and 0s through cables and between satellites.
The infrastructure behind our global financial system is vulnerable. So if you ask me, attainable AI is here just in time. That’s what I told the FSB delegation when I stood up and presented a vision of AI like running water.
It’s hard to imagine an industry that won’t be transformed. Search. Health care. Law. Self-driving cars, of course. Even journalism.
The funny thing is, AI isn’t even new. It was invented by a man named Arthur Samuel, who taught a computer to play checkers in 1962. But like Da Vinci’s flying machine, the idea of AI was born before the technology was in place to support it. AI was ahead of its time, and governments across the globe, from the U.S. to Japan, pulled its research funding. That led to an AI winter that lasted until…
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