AI is ‘most important’ tech today, but it can be misused, says Microsoft exec

Artificial intelligence is “the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today,” observed Dave Coplin, the chief envisioning officer at Microsoft U.K. Coplin made that statement a room full of business leaders at an AI conference in London last week, reported Business Insider.

Companies are investing in AI left and right, and the tech is developing by leaps and bounds. Most people walk around with some form of AI in their pockets every day.

From the simplest applications, like Siri and Cortana, to complex driverless cars, AI has been doing more and more.

According to Coplin, however, it’s not what has already been achieved with AI, but what is possible in the future.

Coplin dug deeper, saying AI “will change how we relate to technology. It will change how we relate to each other. I would argue that it will even change how we perceive what it means to be human.”

Business Insider noted that AI has potential to aid in crucial scientific research such as cancer research.

Still, Coplin isn’t ignorant to the fact that what can be used to do good can, more often than not, also be used to do harm.

The tech is new, Coplin noted, so we don’t know what kind of biases people hold and how those biases will affect the AI they develop. “We’ve got to start to make some decisions about whether the right people are making these algorithms,” Coplin said.

Coplin isn’t the only tech giant to step in with some real talk about the dangers of AI. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of the non-profit AI organization OpenAI, has spoken widely about the risks of AI.

In a past blog post about OpenAI, Musk wrote, “It’s hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it’s equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly.”