The disruptive frontier technologies being developed today – largely without supervision – will transform the world. Entrepreneur Daniel Doll-Steinberg warns business leaders to get ready
Daniel Doll-Steinberg wants you to start paying attention. Specifically, he’s putting out a rallying cry for you to really heed the new reality that is stealthily being constructed with the emergence of frontier technologies.
“We are entering a phase when many well-intentioned people are building technologies to disrupt the way we live. The more people who understand that, adapt to those technologies, and use them in a way that suits them, the less chance we have of experiencing outcomes no-one wants,” he explains.
He refers to Sam Altman – one of those well-intentioned people – who is the CEO of OpenAI and whose ChatGPT brought artificial intelligence to the masses. Altman has said one of his aims is to build artificial general intelligence that would make computers as capable as humans, essentially overtaking people’s marketable skills. His is not the only company with such a goal; DeepMind, Meta and others appear to have similar ambitions.
“They are trying to replace coders, accountants, lawyers and more; but just unleashing something like that onto the world could be catastrophic,” thinks Doll-Steinberg.
So-called frontier technologies – including AI, 5G, blockchain, cryptocurrency and quantum computing – are developing at an exponential rate. In 2019 alone, Amazon spent $36bn (£28.8bn) on R&D to create human-replacement technologies, from robots to smart home assistants. Adoption of these technologies was accelerated by lockdown and as they become increasingly general-purpose – not requiring domain experts to create them – they are expected to be virtually unstoppable.
This is why business leaders need to start really understanding and deploying them today, so they can not only take advantage of them, but they can also counterbalance some of the wilder future concepts emerging, says Doll-Steinberg.
Heidi Vella 