Guest post by TFA Curator Petervan
In Gerd’s recent podcast with Matt Ward from Disruptors.fm, he discussed a theme from last book Technology vs. Humanity called the Megashifts i.e. the 10 most important disruptive forces we need to investigate, such as datafication, virtualisation, automation and cognification. As context to these exponential changes coming towards us, Gerd mentions what he calls the ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ and points out that humanity might well need some similarly catastrophic incident to really jump-start a serious debate and global action on how to control the unbridled glorification of a world run by algorithms and machines,
In the 1940s, Oppenheimer was in charge of the Manhattan Project, tasked to invent the atomic bomb so that the United States could use it to end World War II. Oppenheimer fled Germany because he did not want the Germans to have the bomb. Nevertheless, when Oppenheimer witnessed the actual use of the atomic devices he had helped to make possible, he was desperate: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ (read more about this at Wired). Within 2 decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki the discussion about Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaties (NPTs) got started – and this is what has kept us safe ever since their ratification in 1970.
So what sort of incidents may kickstart a treaty on Artificial General Intelligence, and Human Genome 
Editing? A wave of large-scale cyber-warfare based on faulty black-box AI decisions?
“SHOULD we JUST Do whatever TECHNOLOGY ALLLOWS US TO do?”
We need a “driver’s-license” for politicians and policy makers that will decide on regulation, a collective of “wise” men/women to guide us through this critical inflection point….