PJ Pesce

Certainly I can’t be the only tech founder and CEO willing to call bullshit publicly?!? I thought we were past this crap. Seriously, causing fear in people for a self serving agenda demonstrates a complete lack of ethics, integrity, and maturity. For as far back as I remember, there has been groups of people spreading doom and gloom about something. It’s always something that is gonna kill us all, threatening humanity and life as we know it. And it always seems as though there are some people getting famous, rich, or gaining political power as a result of spreading fear. Unfortunately, fear and negativity sells. Now let’s talk about AI, there are in fact risks and AI is changing the environment we live in. Environmental changes cause evolution, and evolution isn’t kind. It will disrupt people who are unprepared. It will harm people who cannot keep up. It will cause hardships for people and companies. As a result, we need to be smart through the next decade, to help people and companies get through what is coming. It isn’t death, it isn’t destruction. Rather it is a change of thinking and lifestyle that will also come with benefits and advances in medicine, science, energy, quality of life. But to get there, we will have to recognize changes are coming. We are already seeing many of these changes and both the negative and positive effects of it. Let’s take the accelerated cyber security issues we are seeing. I’ve spent most of my career managing critical and large scale software infrastructure and now my company is deep in the weeds solving a lot of these issues. Our entire software stack, that everyone depends on, contains hundreds of millions of lines of code written and audited by people. And we’ve missed bugs. A lot of bugs. Not blaming people, we’ve done the best we can and it’s been great, but the fact is we have lots of software bugs that can be used by malicious hackers. And now AI is shining a light on these bugs. It’s pointing out the problems and helping us find the solutions at an accelerating rate. As a result, we are seeing increasing velocity of security matters. And it will get worse before it gets better as there is still a lot to uncover. Companies need to be preparing for this now. They need to be hiring experts and gurus and partnering with companies that will help them through this. But the long term result? We will end up with a better software infrastructure layer. Betterment is the result of evolution, and that is what we are going to see across the ecosystem. Jobs, science, decisions, everything will be affected by the same curve. A “J” curve. Things will get harder before they get better. Ironically the doom agenda on this helps my own company because we secure the infrastructure. But at the same time, I’m literally saying this will get better over time, things will normalize again. The advances in science, software, medicine, energy, and quality of life will increase, and we are already seeing the evidence of that in research today. So please, let’s be mature adults here. Let’s consider the hardships we are going to be facing, and come up with plans and mitigations to help get us all get to the better place. Fear mongering ends up distracting us from managing the real effects of AI disruption to people and companies.

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