FEATURE: OPEN TECHNOLOGY
to stop them from being open source and the way that the adoption of code licensed in this way creates a risk to the ecosystems is really important. You also have to unlearn a lot of what you’ re taught in other traditional environments to really begin to understand open source. For example, you’ re going to be collaborating with your competitors, building relationships and engaging with people with whom you might be at loggerheads; you enter a phase of coopetition rather than competition. Mastering that is an art form.
How you share as well as generate revenue is really critical for the future of open source.
How do you envision the role of open technology evolving in the next few years?
It’ s really hard to know what’ s going to happen in the next three weeks, let alone three years in tech today, partly thanks to AI. We’ ve been in situations before where the pace of change has been dramatic – the internet, the introduction of smartphones and devices – and we’ re back in that now with AI. AI is just a tool, and it’ s a tool that humanity should be controlling rather than being controlled by. If AI is channelled well, it will improve productivity and reduce the number of man-hours we all have to sit working.
That’ s something that will create a societal shift. A societal shift happened with smartphones, where we’ re controlled by them, constantly on them and constantly replying to people – always accessible. That happened because we didn’ t think about the social and human impact of the tool and allowed those designing services to do this in a way that was good for business rather than people.
This new AI technology has to be managed properly to ensure that it doesn’ t end up controlling us, and we must learn from the past. The scale and drama of AI demand a focus on how we make it work. It will affect every part of our lives in the future: family, workplace, education, economics, politics and more. There’ s going to be a huge socioeconomic impact that has to be grappled with by political and public leadership. For our futures with
AI to be well managed, we need to trust it, and that requires transparency of the tools and data, which can only be delivered through openness. p
40 INTELLIGENTCIO EUROPE www. intelligentcio. com