Microsoft exec: 'AI is the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today'

 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/microsoft-exec-ai-is-the-most-important-technology-that-anybody-on-the-planet-is-working-on-today-2016-5

 Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft UK, told an audience of business leaders at an AI conference that AI is “the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today.”

 

 I think he probably forgot to add "And we own the copyright on it , so pay up ! " 

But Coplin argues that societies need to start paying more attention to who is developing AI as they can build it to behave how they want it to, which may not always be a good thing. “We’ve got to start to make some decisions about whether the right people are making these algorithms,” he said. “What biases will be inferred by those people, by those companies? These are things we don’t know about. This is new. We talk about unchartered territory.”

This is what I wanted to get into . 
This , and Ferguson Missouri.

What if good old James Knowles III (mayor of Ferguson) got a hold of all that information , which by the way is for sale to anyone with two nickles to rub together , and then got an AI to run analysis on it ? 

What if he decided "Those blacks aren't going to vote for me anyways, lets throw them all in jail ! Because if you've been in jail , you're a felon , and felons don't get to vote ! Make the jails dark ! "

What if he had a profile on every person in his town. Blacks, Whites, Spanish , Mexican , the works. 

What if he could herd all the people who weren't going to vote for him into one place, say all the blacks in a particular part of town , and order the cops just to ticket them into the ground , charge ridiculous rates of interest on those tickets ,and throw every black who couldn't pay into jail. Thus no one could see what was happening to them, AND they couldn't vote him out of office. 

What if they held an election , and he won, and he publically stated "Huh ! Only 30% of the blacks voted against me. I must be doing my job right. " When really it was more like only 30% of the blacks were permitted to vote ? 

What if ...

Hey ! 
I see what you're doing here ! None of these things are actually What If's ! They all actually happened ! 
Yeah , now you see the problem I have with people knowing everything there is to know about you.