Future fest 2023: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Pakistan’s largest tech conference and expo, Future Fest, was inaugurated today at Expo Lahore.
The event is open to the public till 8th January 2023. Future Fest 2023 is hosting more than 250
speakers, 150 international guests from 15 countries, 100+ key partners and 20+ activities, and
over 50,000 attendees.

Indeed, Future Fest 2023 is hosting a historic delegation of Saudi startups and venture capitalists
who are meeting Pakistani companies and key stakeholders to explore investments, partnerships,
acquisitions, and talent recruitment. Dedicated to using technology to pave the way for the future
of Pakistan, the event has brought together leaders from more than 50 industries to foster
discussion on the future of life itself. Entrepreneurs, decision makers, policymakers, thought
leaders, investors, and innovators are engaged in discussions about the most important aspects of
current times and how technology can play a positive role in #SaveTheFuture.

In Pakistan in the 1940s, there was no place for innovation, and becoming affluent required
being born into a wealthy family with extensive commercial or agricultural holdings. But that in
this day and age, you may become a successful tech entrepreneur. “To get wealthy, all you need
is talent, knowledge, and effort. In this age of change, Pakistan has several opportunities to
advance.”

In like manner, this new computer science technology, if we even call it computer science at all.
The machines will be so powerful and already know how to do so many things that the field will
look like less of an engineering endeavor and more of an educational one; that is, how to best
educate the machine, not unlike the science of how to best educate children in school. Unlike
(human) children, though, these AI systems will be flying our airplanes, running our power grids,
and possibly even governing entire countries. I would argue that the vast majority of Classical
CS becomes irrelevant when our focus turns to teaching intelligent machines rather than directly
programming them. Programming, in the conventional sense, will in fact be dead....

We are rapidly moving toward a world where the fundamental building blocks of computation
are temperamental, mysterious, adaptive agents. This shift in the underlying definition of
computing presents a huge opportunity, and plenty of huge risks. Yet I think it is time to accept
that this is a very likely future, and evolve our thinking accordingly, rather than just sit here
waiting for the meteor to hit. The world is changing at an alarming rate, increasing uncertainty.
At Future Fest, bring together visionaries, policymakers, innovators, entrepreneurs and business
leaders to ask a simple question: what’s next?

As far as my concern, the debate right now is primarily around the extent to which these AI
models are going to revolutionize the field. It's more a question of degree rather than whether it's
going to happen.
Welsh says in a video interview “I think we're going to change from a world in which people are
primarily writing programs by hand to a world in which we're teaching AI models how to do
things that we want them to do... It starts to feel more like a field that focus on AI education and
maybe even AI psychiatry. In order to solve these problems, you can't just assume that people are
going to be writing the code by hand."