AI isn’t going to take over the world, but Big Tech will, if we don’t act now

Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans
Published in
5 min readJun 10, 2023

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IMAGE: A toaster launching the toasts up in the air…
IMAGE: 849356 — Pixabay

If there’s one thing I can’t handle, it’s mass hysteria; and if there’s one thing worse, it’s people who make it their business to generate mass hysteria. Spreading alarm is now used by spin doctors of all kinds use to influence everything from opinion to legislation and regulation, and I find that practice, in addition to being a perversion of democracy, repugnant.

Sure, these are fast-changing times: machine learning, which many prefer to call artificial intelligence or AI despite the fact that it is neither intelligent (it makes sophisticated statistical correlations, which is no small thing) nor much less artificial (there is nothing more natural than the data it works with, generated by all of us), has woken from many decades of peaceful history, through long winters, technical limitations, then sudden advances to become, following the launch of ChatGPT in November, a threat to humanity, comparable to pandemics or nuclear war.

Why do I say that AI is not intelligent? Because we learn through statistical correlations that our brain manages, by deductions supported by those observed correlations. And this is pretty much how we teach machines. The difference is that while machines can more or less copy our way of learning, they are still machines: they have no intention other than the…

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Enrique Dans
Enrique Dans

Professor of Innovation at IE Business School and blogger (in English here and in Spanish at enriquedans.com)