Toine Rodenburg remembers when the Internet was an arcane latest innovation based on dial-up technology and boxy Macintoshes. He began to assume its possibilities within the early 90s, soon after earning degrees at an array of prestigious European universities, from the Moller Institute and the Katholieke Universiteit in Tilburg to the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Institut Catholique de Paris.
His course of study, emphasizing philosophy and theology, never gave the impression to be the perfect foundation for a profession in cyberspace — until now. With the arrival of AI, Toine Rodenburg is positioned as the proper observer of this latest technology, a person who understands not only the technical details, but additionally the profound implications of artificial intelligence.
Recently he shared his thoughts with Entrepreneurship on what the longer term holds for AI, the Internet usually and his own worldwide entrepreneurial ventures.
Q: You are well-known in your work in e-commerce, particularly together with your MyMalls international shipping company. What led to your interest in AI?
Toine Rodenburg: I feel at every stage of the event of the Internet, I’ve continually been wondering: What comes next. That’s helpful from a business perspective, after all — having a grasp of market trends and emerging latest technologies is an important component of making successful firms. But beyond that, I’ve at all times been excited by latest frontiers.
What I haven’t experienced myself, I’ve examine extensively. I used to be particularly fascinated by the earliest version of the Internet, the U.S. Defense Department’s ARPANET. I’ve read the biographies of industry greats, from Steve Jobs to Sergey Brin. When it involves latest technology, on each the micro and macro level I’m an early adopter.
AI is something entirely latest to human existence, after all; and it seems to have happened so suddenly. Only yesterday computer algorithms were used for what were essentially minor tasks, comparable to managing telemarketing decision trees. Today, AI-powered computing is writing every part from term papers to wedding vows. For me, as an entrepreneur, these exponentially expanding capabilities provide latest opportunities, in my global shipping business and with other ventures that suddenly turn into not only possible, but additionally compelling.
Q: Is there a danger in AI?
Toine Rodenburg: It’s true that there are risks, but I feel they might be managed. Although distinguished AI pioneers, starting from Elon Musk to pink-slipped Google AI ethicists, have urged a moratorium on further advances in AI research, it’s clear that the logic of those advances will proceed to hold us forward. We don’t know the destination, but we also know we are able to’t unknow what we now have discovered, or what AI has learned. No one can turn back the clock on AI, but we are able to make it a priority to know its abilities, and the way these self-endowed talents are more likely to evolve.
Q: What does that mean in real-world situations?
Toine Rodenburg: AI is a transformational technology, so in some sense most of us will need to rework the way in which we currently do things. College professors will need to search out ways to find AI cheating amongst students. Economists might want to imagine latest ways to make sure social stability when the efficiencies of AI wipe out whole industries and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Banking and investment professionals might want to devise ways to discover whether a trader in equities or cryptocurrencies is an AI program, and to create guardrails that may protect the economic system against the potential for AI manipulation.
Political leaders will need to know the risks of tying AI into the military decision-making process — and the brand new threats posed by any adversary that’s linking its own military and weaponry to AI command-and-control. They may even need to arrange for the very real probability that AI can be harnessed by bad actors, whether hackers demanding ransoms or unhinged individuals using AI to create deadly pathogens, disrupt energy infrastructure or throw elections.
Above all, the creators of AI might want to try to maintain pace with the inner processes by which AI is teaching itself. Several top AI scientists have revealed that, even now, they will not be quite sure how AI is solving certain varieties of problems. Its neural nets have gotten more opaque as AI accelerates into latest planes of intelligence. Its thought process will only turn into harder to know because it learns more — and understands more.
