It seems like barely a week goes by without a headline warning about the risk of unbridled development of artificial intelligence, also known as machine learning.

We’re Running Out of Time to Stop Killer Robot Weapons: The Guardian

At On-Demand Education Marketplace, we believe mankind must strike a balance between exploiting the benefits of AI and avoiding the most-negative consequences of aggressive development of thinking machines.

Elon Musk and others (including the late Stephen Hawking) have spoken out about the dangers of rapidly advancing AI research as we move toward singularity — the point where machines overtake us on the intelligence scale.

This month’s 50th anniversary of the release of “2001: A Space Odyssey” probably did little to ease Musk’s concerns. Remember HAL, the film’s terrifyingly polite, lipreading computer (with a Canadian accent) that decides that the crew on a mission to Jupiter is incompetent? “Dave,” HAL says to one of the astronauts. “This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”

Musk, the founder of SpaceX and co-founder of electric-car maker Tesla, says extreme development of AI is more dangerous than the threat of nuclear war. He has repeatedly called for AI research to be regulated. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last year dismissed Musk’s doomsday comments as “pretty irresponsible.”

[Which reminds me of an old joke about the future of air travel.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome to the world’s first, fully automated passenger aircraft. Please sit back, relax and enjoy the flight for nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong…”]

All kidding aside, at ODEM we’re excited about putting AI to work. We’re moving ahead to use blockchain technology and artificial intelligence to improve the quality of interactions between students and educators toward making higher-quality education more accessible and affordable.

ODEM will use smart contracts, a blockchain-based category of AI, to streamline and automate the laborious process of organizing and delivering in-person academic programs.

We believe that artificial intelligence also has a role to play in guiding students in their choice of academic courses to insulate them from the danger of being displaced in the workforce by the application of artificial intelligence.

While history shows us that technological advances tend to create more jobs than they eliminate over the longer-term, some job categories will be more vulnerable to disruption than others.

In Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It’s Taking Us Next, the author Luke Dormehl says society must do better at educating up-and-coming generations of workers.

“Currently, education is stuck in the same Industrial Revolution paradigm it has been in for more than 100 years,” he writes.

Dormehl argues that formal education is too focused on standardized training that doesn’t adequately prepare students for a working life in fast-changing industries.

“In today’s world, learned skills routinely become obsolete within the decade their learned — meaning that continual learning and assessment is needed throughout people’s lives,” he writes.

ODEM is empowering students to actively own their training and education. Our platform provides tools for students to proactively search globally and to register for relevant in-person courses to ensure they stay ahead in the evolving marketplace of skills.

ODEM is actively harnessing the power of blockchain technology, latent market forces and the process of higher learning to help ensure that for millions of people around the best is, indeed, yet to come. Fasten your seatbelts.

Rich Maaghul

CEO