TRANSCIPT
Welcome to Throw Forward Thursday where we jump into the future and see what it looks like. Today, we go into 2038 and we’re going to take a slightly different style to this week’s Throw Forward Thursday. Our team at Tomorrow Today Global puts together what we call news bulletins from the future. This is to act as thought provokers for our clients and I want to share one or two of these with you over the next few weeks. And so today we’re going to hear a radio broadcast from the future announcing, well, this is possibly the future of politics.
Here’s a two and a half minute radio broadcast from the year 2038. Have a listen.
We interrupt our normal programming with some breaking news this Wednesday afternoon, 12th of May, 2038. In a stunning election victory yesterday, Ha Latada was elected president of Estonia. If you haven’t heard of Ha Latada before, this might not sound surprising until you hear that Ha Latada is not a person, it’s a computer algorithm developed by the Kodanik party of Estonia. This is the first time an artificial intelligence computer algorithm will take the lead in a national government in any country around the world. The use of artificial intelligence has been commonplace in many industries for over a decade. It gathered acclaim with the financial advice industry in the early 2020’s as investors increasingly relied on A.I. algorithms to manage their share portfolios rather than risk their investment on human intelligence and emotions. It was actually way back in 2014 that a Japanese venture capital firm first appointed an A.I. algorithm to its board of directors to act as director of New Pharmaceutical Ventures. By 2027, Japan had made it illegal for financial advisors to give advice without consulting an algorithm.
The medical industry was the next to embrace A.I., employing algorithms extensively in the diagnosis of diseases and prescriptions of treatments. By the late 2020s, patients had not just accepted the use of A.I. by their doctors, they were insisting on it. It wasn’t much of a stretch when the British National Health Service started replacing doctors with A.I. bots in 2029. It was a roaring success, reducing costs for the NHS, but also significantly improving the experience for patients.
As more and more industries prove the value of A.I. and the average person in the street becomes more confident using computer based intelligence systems in many different ways in their daily lives, perhaps it was inevitable that these algorithms would make their way into the political world. And it was probably also inevitable that Estonia would be the first country to experiment with A.I. politicians. Estonia is one of the world’s leading digital nations. Back in 2016, Estonia started experimenting with digital citizenship and was a founding member of the Digital Nations Group of countries.
Ha Latada the computer programme, is now the Estonian president and will hold the position for the next five years. The rest of the world will watch eagerly wondering or maybe even hoping if very soon we can get rid of all politicians everywhere.
So actually, this week’s Throw Forward Thursday is not really about politics only, it’s about A.I. artificial intelligence. Although, you know, I prefer to talk about I.A. or intelligent assistance. Artificial intelligence has a little bit of a scary connotation. We think that the machines are coming, they’re going to take over, do things that we don’t want them to do. I think we need to start thinking of intelligent assistance and what that means in various aspects of our life, like politics, like financial advice, like medicine, we, I think, are going to reach a point where we are saying there are certain aspects of those areas of our lives where it’s going to be better to have somebody make a decision that’s a little bit impassionate. In other words, you know, let’s take the emotion out, let’s take some of the bias out, let’s take some of the corruption that sometimes happens. Let’s take that out of the system. All the things that come when a human being is involved in the decision making process and instead the machines do that.
I genuinely think that when it comes to politics, Estonia’s got a good shot at being the first country to actually do that. They really are ahead of almost everybody else in the world at the moment in terms of e-government and e-services from the government to the people. If you didn’t know that, check them out, it is remarkable. But I think that over the next little while we’re going to see this coming into many different aspects of our lives.
And maybe you can think about how intelligent assistance, not A.I, but I say might be helpful in your life, in your office, in your work. Let the people do what the people are great at doing. Let the machines do the things where we don’t need people or even where we don’t want people to be making the decisions. Throw Forward. Thursday, as always, it’s great to have you along. Please make sure that you subscribe. If you’re on YouTube, hit the bell notification in the corner over there to make sure that, you know, when we upload a new one, but it’s every Thursday, so just keep coming back. If you’re listening to the podcast, please write us on your favourite podcast platform. It helps other people to find us. And I will see you next Thursday when we go into the future once more and find out what’s going to happen.
Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognized futurist, specializing in the future of work. He helps organizations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognized brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.