U.S. President Barack Obama is no stranger to artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies despite not being known for his interest in computer technology. The President reportedly just got rid of his Blackberry, and the world seemed mightily surprised the day he was photographed donning a virtual reality headset. Nonetheless, earlier this year Obama showed some tech savvy by stating, or perhaps warning, that a good percent of Americans earning $20 or less would lose their job to AI in the near future.

President Obama has further expanded his thoughts on artificial intelligence in a interview with the director of MIT’s Media Lab Joi Ito, and Wired Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich. The three covered a wide range of topics in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, ranging from who controls the technologies poised to change the world the ethics of AI creation and how we are going to be affected when we “interface with machines.”  

Obama the philosopher

Throughout the interview, Obama sounded like a man who knows what he’s talking about, grounded in current AI, specialized AI and futuristic “Matrix” AI. He sings a similar tune to most of the tech giants in that machines are our future, but also tells us that AI “has some downsides that we’re gonna have to figure out in terms of not eliminating jobs. It could increase inequality. It could suppress wages.” The consensus regarding jobs is nothing new: intuitive, social jobs remain human, data grinding service occupations will become more automated.

In perhaps the most heartening part of the interview, Obama waxes philosophical, saying, “Part of what makes us human are the kinks. They’re the mutations, the outliers, the flaws that create art or the new invention, right? We have to assume that if a system is perfect, then it’s static.”

The topics of AI ethics and how industries will be affected by automation have long been discussed, but one issue that no one seems to have brought up is that the creators of AI are mostly white males. Ito said this is a concern, seeing that the developers creating the technologies lauded to change the world have little experience of diversity.

“All the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us,” Ito said. He then asked how do we build values into AI? Whose values? The values of American middle-class white males? This is a fine talking point – reminiscent of the recently divisive issue of online censorship AI – in arguably one of Obama’s most interesting interviews.

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