What is your company’s most valuable resource? Often you’d hear “People” as a response. Now that an A.I can do the work of hundreds, maybe thousands, what does this mean for us in 2023?
It’s important to note that while A.I is every bit as impressive as you’ve probably been led to believe, we don’t know exactly how it is functioning, all we know is that it is improving exponentially.
Allow me to preface a few things, I have Autism Spectrum Disorder and ADHD. Fortunately for me, it manifested in the form of me learning how to read and speak at 2 years old and having a not insignificant IQ. This means that since before I would walk, I have been constantly parsing and absorbing information around me. I have a unique sensory landscape and this gives me a novel perspective on the world. Art, mathematics, & music are, to me, one language. I believe that it is seen as so complex that it is recognised as many things rather than one. I also have an uncanny ability to seek out and then identify patterns where there may appear to be none. I say this because throughout my life, technology & spirituality have always had a strong effect on me. To me they feel like the same thing, namely a vehicle to attain higher understanding and capability, and to utilize this in order to create.
The progression of technology has been a special interest for me and so I decided to make some comments on A.I.
There are use cases for this technology that many businesses are yet to consider. Access to vastly more processing power could completely transform a business from its structure to its goals and how it achieves them. Imagine having an A.I discover that by modifying the transparency of your windows a few percent, you could save X thousand dollars per year. Or finding out that if you change a chemical formula in your product, you could create something completely new, or improve what you already have by a significant margin. These are the small changes.
Trillions of dollars in potential profits seems like a tantalising prospect but will that money even be useful by the time these goals have been reached? Something we will quickly come to realise about A.I is that if we all have access to it, our ideas become currency, not our labor. All the technical administrative tasks will eventually be taken over by vastly more efficient systems. Many see this as the loss of jobs but I wonder why it is not seen as the regaining of time?
Anyone who believes we could destroy ourselves needs to look up how many WMDs the world currently has stockpiled “just in case”.
The answer is creativity. The real impact will come from being able to ask an A.I to perform specific tasks in a specific way. These “Unique Requests” are what will lead to truly groundbreaking discoveries and solutions. We are essentially in the beginnings of the breakthrough lottery, ask an A.I the right question or tell it to perform the right task and you might find whole new industries or aspects of our society change.