Artificial Intelligence (AI) - What for!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a huge buzz word in science magazines and also in daily life. It also entered our everyday life in different contexts unfortunately mostly in marketing domain. The biggest companies hire the best minds from universities to work on AI projects so that they can do targeted marketing and sell more products, hence support further the consumption economy. On the other hand isn’t it true that this consumption economy got out of hand over the years and practically created the major world problems that are summarized by UNDP under the title Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)?

The mantra of the corporate world, ‘maximizing the shareholder value’ unfortunately often ignores the stakeholders, the nature, the society at large. Based on the The Economist article very recently the 180 CEOs of the major corporations came together to reword the mantra and kindly took the stakeholder into consideration . Technology is often used by the corporation again in a single dimension, namely ‘to maximize the shareholder value’, and the effects of technology on the nature and the society is often ignored. It is time to take an holistic view on the problem solving through technology.

AI as the front runner of the technology may have the largest effect on society and the nature, it can either accelerate the consumption mentality that often ignores the negative side of technology or help us to generate new assumptions and new set of rules so that SDGs can be tackled properly and we can find happiness and peace without consuming. It is a moment of truth, what kind of world we would like to hand over to our kids!

 Dogan Taskent