Will Artificial Intelligence disrupt the 'business of you'?

A couple of centuries ago, the agricultural industry accounted for the largest portion of the world’s economy. Plantation owners ruled the world then, in much the same way that oil barons, weapons manufacturers and mining giants have done since. Today, it’s the turn of giant information technology companies. The agrarian economy was driven by climate, soil conditions, access to cheap labour and transportation infrastructure to move goods and labour efficiently. Shifts and changes in the global economy today are driven by technological innovation.?

Is it too early or too difficult to imagine what industrial force or power could unseat the information technology giants from their hegemonic position in the global economy today? Living in the early half of the 19th century, it may have been near impossible to imagine how agriculture - which had been the bedrock of the world economy since the dawn of civilisation and grown even more powerful with the race to control the spice trade, could ever be overtaken by another industry. After all, food remains more essential for human survival than any of the industries that overtook agriculture - certainly more than oil or armaments. Clearly, it is not inelasticity of demand or essentiality of the product that determines its position. So what are the market dynamics propel some industries to the apex of the global economy in a given epoch?

One of the theories that help explain the dynamics of how businesses as well as entire industries can be taken over by others is the theory of ‘disruptive innovation’ - a term coined by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. It was popularised in a subsequent article published in the Harvard Business Review and his book ‘The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail’ published in 1997.

Christensen - when he came up with the theory - was thinking primarily about how new entrants and sometimes competing technological innovations transform industries and unseat established players and legacy technologies as a consequence. The case studies he analyse from the steel industry to microprocessor manufacturers illustrate the dynamics of disruptive innovations within an industry. So how can we apply those theories to speculate how entire industries could be disrupted in future?

The theme of “Briefcase (ad)Ventures” so far has been to explore a rather simple idea. That is; whether we can compare ourselves to businesses. It was a useful exercise for two reasons. Life is no easy business. Therefore, could we adopt some of the theories that help businesses survive and succeed, also for ourselves to improve as individuals? I have already shared what I have been able to learn from posing this question to my colleagues and leading very interesting discussions about it. Secondly, if business theory can be applied to life, we must equally be able to apply some of the principles of life to business as well!

Sculptors have been able to produce statues of incredible human likeness for quite a long time. But we are either extremely lucky or terribly unfortunate to live in an incredible epoch in human history where we are either very close to or by some accounts already have created likenesses of the human mind. Some find this terribly alarming - because while human minds are largely constrained by the vulnerability and limitations of our bodies, the types of Artificial Intelligence that we create have pervaded our communications networks which give them access to a wide array of tools, capabilities and controls.

So what does this mean for us, and how is it relevant to the theories of disruptive innovation and industrial shifts? The forces that have caused the global economy to shift from agriculture to energy was associated with fundamental changes to the means of production. Consequently, in a world where almost every conceivable good could be mass produced, marketing and distribution had to be the primary differentiator, paving way for a shift to a world dominated by information and communications technology. Are the advancements in Artificial Intelligence over the last few years in particular going to help entrench the hegemony of technology companies over the world economy?

This may be one of the most interesting and - in a business sense - one of the post profitable questions to ask right now because the answer is of existential importance. But there are a few problems we need to overcome in our search for, or the vetting of, available answers. One of the key difficulties is that there are no precedents in recorded history that could help illustrate the consequences of an invention being able to mimic the inventor. The most obvious parallel in literature is the story of Pinochio, but surely, literary analysis is not going to help us make reliable predictions about the economy and business! I have found it astonishing however, that the creation story in the bible has so many parallels with the creation of artificial intelligence and its consequences, but that’s a different discussion altogether.

What we call Artificial Intelligence today is not really ‘intelligence’ but advanced prediction machines. Artificial Intelligence that is capable of driving a car is just exceptionally good at predicting what a good human driver would do in a given moment. Based on that principle, all they could do is predict what a good human analyst or artist or CEO or foreign policy adviser would do. The limits engineers are faced with have to do with figuring out all the relevant dimensions an AI model needs to have and how it should then be tuned and trained to generate useful predictions.

There are many cognitive tasks where AI can already perform on par with or exceeding human beings. Not only is that number going to increase but the machines are going to become exceedingly better than humans in each area. Where all this ties in for me however is the simpler and more straightforward realisation that Artificial Intelligence will directly compete with 'the business of you' and 'the business of me'.?

If AI is not capable of doing what I do today, will there be an ever-increasing likelihood that it will with each passing day? If it doesn’t disrupt the business of you and me in our lifetimes, will there be an increasing likelihood that it will disrupt the business of our children? I personally believe that there are a lot more factors that will come into play before we get to that. For example, if Artificial Intelligence were to disrupt a sufficiently large number of jobs together with people’s livelihoods and avenues of creative expression across the world, that may create more substantial social problems which would eclipse the threats to our jobs or even of a ‘Terminator’.?

Humans consume a broad range of goods and services, have a desire to create and express themselves in varied ways, feel emotions and have a capacity to find meaning in epic, comedic and tragic adventures; those markets will remain open. Furthermore, human beings have desires - not least of which is the desire to explore and improve. AI has none of those attributes, and only consumes energy and information. To that extent, there will always be an economy that exclusively caters to human needs. But what if AI is able to satisfy every single human need and mimic human desire even better than humans could?

Perhaps the most important fact we need to keep in mind is that all Artificial Intelligence tools will be developed and supported by human owners, and as such will always be employed to further the interests of those human owners. Artificial Intelligence systems will no doubt become more powerful and potent than any political, economic or technological force has been before, but they are not invulnerable.

To the extent that we can discern the true interests of those who own and operate the most powerful AI systems, there will be ways for us to both use AI to further our own interests and defend them. So, for as long as we as human beings desire to know the truth and differentiate between what is authentically human and what is not, there will be room for a new industry to emerge that could yet again revolutionise our world!