People-centered Economy’s Vint Cerf on the United Nations Centennial e-book “Remaking the world – The Age of Global Enlightenment”

May 22, 2021News

Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, member of AIWS City’s Board of Leaders, contribute his concepts of the People Centered Economy to the e-book “Remaking the world – The Age of Global Enlightenment”

Here are some of his quotes in the book:

““We have to raise this point of people-centeredness because we have become a society that is deeply dependent on machines. We are a creative species. We are a species that are tool makers and as our history has unfolded we have increased our dependence on and our ability to create machines that work for us or help us do our work. So I think that it’s very important for us to recall the people-centered focus that we are drawn to in today’s discussions.”

“What I need for you to appreciate is that the side effects of invention do not always become apparent when they are invented and when they are put to use. Indeed in some cases it may take decades to understand in some depth the consequences of technology.»

«Machine learning is a powerful new tool and as we explore all of its powerful positive uses which we experience daily, we will eventually experience the abuses to which this new technology is put to work and we will be confronted once again with the question of how to manage that problem»

«We know that machine learning tools don’t always get it right. We also know that some of the failures are quite subtle although they are also dramatic.»

«The machine learning system doesn’t see things the way we do. Human beings have this amazing ability to abstract from images to recognize various features in the images that that help us identify things the machine learning tools are recognizing features but not necessarily the ones that you and I would normally use in order to identify a cat and a dog and a crocodile. This is just one very trivial example of the ways in which machine learning tools can fail and the reason that’s so important for us to keep this in mind is that the failures can be very harmful.»

«It’s essential to have in the back of our minds a sense for how those tools might fail or might be deliberately abused and you we will need an international call operation in order to induce and introduce this people-centeredness into the use of artificial intelligence because we will use these techniques on a global scale.»

«So now we have to figure out what the international agreements are going to be. Not only to deal with the abuses of the internet and its applications but also the potential abuses of machine learning. That is going to require some deep thought and some deep understanding and some dependence on technologists who are much smarter than I am.»”