“Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?” is written, refreshingly, not by the usual suspects from the Anglosphere, but by a group of academics from universities in Germany and Switzerland, notes The Washington Post’s Christian Caryl:
As the authors point out, we already inhabit a world of sensors, one where our every move, our every read, our every financial transaction is relentlessly mined and processed by massive, interconnected computing systems. And these systems, thanks in part to exponentially increasing data volumes, are enabling ever-more-ambitious expert systems and other forms of artificial intelligence. As the authors write, “this all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today’s jobs will be threatened by algorithms. 40% of today’s top 500 companies will have vanished in a decade.” Those who comprehend the scale of this next wave of change — people like Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak (of Apple fame) — are already “starting to ring alarm bells.”
