Artificial Intelligence & Large Language Models, The New “Bicycles for the Mind”.

I’ll admit that I’ve been a fan and an admirer of Steve Jobs, the famous Apple cofounder. Sure, he’s been thought of as polarizing and has been called rude or worse, but in fact, he got a lot right. I think it’s hard to say otherwise.

One of the things Jobs spoke about and was quoted in Newsweek Magazine back in 1984 was how computers would become a “bicycle for the mind” which to me, at least, made little sense at face value. Jobs went on to explain that there was a study conducted about locomotion efficiencies – or said otherwise – how much energy does a particular animal have to expend to move forward. The condor was by far in a way the most impressively efficient animal, expending the least energy to travel swiftly, likely aided by its huge wingspan. Man was far down the list, to the point where we as people are bordering on classic inefficiency.

Interestingly, Jobs then mentioned how the inefficient man was able to move to the top of the list and even out-perform the amazing condor if he rode a bicycle. The bicycle, he said, allowed man to spend far less energy while moving swiftly with the greatest of all locomotion efficiency. Jobs was, comparing the man on a bicycle to the use of a personal computer and how people would, according to him, be able to outperform a man without one by orders of magnitude in most ways and tasks. Just as the bicycle would push humans further, faster and with greater ease, the computer would do the same.

Of course it’s easy to look back on the forty or so years since the Jobs Newsweek article and see that yes, it proved true, many times over.

Fast forward to today and we are at another interesting crossroads, just as we were in the early days of personal computing, but today with the amazing growth of AI in almost everything we do. AI was once limited to science fiction stories about smart computers, some good and others looking to take over the world, has arrived on the scene and in fact, we cannot have a conversation without it somehow coming up.

As companies consider AI and how to deploy it’s amazing potential, it’s met with mixed reaction of both excitement and fear. The primary fear-inducing element is, from what I’ve observed, the question of, “will AI replace me at work and make my work less valuable?” ?For most professional jobs, it’s a blanket “no”, at least not quite yet, but that doesn’t mean that AI has no role.

What if we, just for a moment, redefined AI as “augmented intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence” and think of it, as Jobs did about the personal computer, as a way to maximize our output and in many ways, just become more efficient and effective in our work? What if it can take an already reasonably good office worker and make him 10x more productive without working harder? What if we could leverage the technology to guide and aid us in our daily work routines, enabling us to do work in minutes that could have taken a day or more? What if AI was our professional copilot in or lives, guiding, coaching, and just sharing helpful thoughts as we go about our day?

This idea of human augmentation, much like the Jobs’ bicycle metaphor is coming soon and could be real within a year or so. Maybe less.

There is really no need to be afraid of it. It’s not here to replace us, much less kill us. It is, however, poised to be the greatest boon to human locomotion since the personal computer arrived on the scene 40 years ago.

One such tool, ChatGPT from OpenAI, the research organization leading much of the recent advancements in this space, has been assessed to currently have the equivalent of a human IQ of nearly that of Albert Einstein. (In the 4.0 version of the Large Language Model) and a version 5 will be coming in about a year. If the roughly 10-20x increase in capability and overall “intelligence” we saw in the leap from version 3 to version 4, just imagine the potential of yet another 10x or greater leap forward.

This future, and not a far or distant one is exciting and full of promise. Imagine having a device with the brains of Einstein, if not even more in your pocket, guiding and coaching you as you navigate your day. I can imagine that day and it’s on our doorstep.

Marc Mandel works at QuestionPro (www.questionpro.com ) where he leads the North American CX business. These views, however, are my own.