The Data Revolution and why we need AI

05.15.2023 #ai

Roughly 5 years ago I wrote an article on why Wayne Gretsky kills the idea that AI will replace humans. I took some hits, "dinosaur" "pessimist" etc. As one who always embraced new frontiers with the curiosity of an adolescent engineer, it seemed to my fellow surfers I was letting this wave pass.

I acknowledge we are in the "Data Revolution" (my term) and according to my calculations, it is our 4th major industrial advancement, following the Digital Revolution - 1980 to 2005. If the Industrial Revolution was an 80-year span and the digital one lasted 25, buckle up for a quick 8-10 that will greatly change our world.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) marks the beginning of the second half of this revolution. We are reaching the height of data collection, daily discovering data we never knew before. Results that we guessed were happening all the time but were invisible to our eyes and therefore we didn't think mattered. We've invented the smallest sensors that can go into motor oil, blood, etc. that instantly report on performance, temperature, longevity, etc. We can't get this data quickly enough. We would wait for a quarterly report so we could call in an order that would be hand-gestured to a clerk in the mosh pit on the trading floor. Now we take a look at a Company's ground-level performance for the last 15 minutes and buy or sell with a click on our phone. When we see our other Gamestop friends do this simultaneously, we change the market instantly. And thanks to the rapid rise of massive storage capacity on smaller hardware, we can store almost infinite amounts of data. It can be overwhelming, much like looking up the mountain and seeing an avalanche of data rumbling toward you.

But it's not as bad as the unhealthy work environments of the Industrial Revolution or that we all seem to need reading glasses thanks to the Digital Revolution. Fortunately, we are not yet buried like a modern-day Pompeiian, as our initial AI mistakes result from conclusions based on the minuscule amount of data we can swallow and run through our brains at any one moment. For example, a large healthcare organization accidentally created a bias in its algorithm because it did not correlate the illness and race data together. The human brain is the largest of all animals but it was never designed to process a fraction of all this data. Mistakenly, it makes us feel safer to assume we can eat our way out of the avalanche.

This is where AI can come to the rescue! AI quickly processes and examines ALL this for us, including the relationships between new, old, and dissimilar data. This is the start and focus for the second half of the Data Revolution. The role of the research analyst has been replaced by a machine. We used to assign research projects to newly graduated analysts, twice as smart and quick, and they would scour the internet for an entire day and proudly present the results. Now I type the same assignment into ChatGPT or Google's BARD (spoiler alert - it doesn't sing the answer in poetic form unless you ask it to) and I've got my research report in SECONDS! Even scarier the prose is in my style because AI has read everything I've ever written or recorded.

AI is a tool in human hands that can do harm or create a work of art. I asked https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt "What is ChatGPT", and the bot's answer starts with "OpenAI’s?mission ?is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity." (editor note: how do you cite a bot?) It's a good answer but there is a part of me that feels AI has a creepy feel to it like the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Oddity. But alas, without the Digital Revolution, there would be no remote control and uninterrupted couch surfing. I believe AI will save me from a snow/lava data death and even more seriously, one day save my life from something like Cancer, etc. Remove the S from Superman's chest and replace it with an AI. Bring it on.

DISCLAIMER: This article came directly from my human mind and was typed with my human fingers. To prove this, I've left in all poor use of English. Can you spot it? However one of my favorite AI tools - www.grammarly.com did automatically fix my grammar as I typed....sigh, grin