The Future Proof

Are you ready for 2023? It's going to be a wild ride. Everyone's worried about Chat GPT, GPT3 and all of the AI that's going to take their jobs. So the question is...how do you make yourself future-proof? Let's talk about that.

These new technologies are pretty good at mimicking what people do. They are trained on massive amounts of data and try to predict what you want to know, then relay it to you in a conversational manner.

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Join my new Live Stream - The Future in Tech

By the way, I'm hosting a new livestream this year on what to do to make yourself future-proof and how you can leverage new technologies to make you a more effective and successful individual. I'm starting out talking about what 2023 is going to be like with Natalie Pao and Simon St.Laurent . They are charting the future of what will be in the LinkedIn Learning library in 2023. Check out the link for a notification.

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The Market is Moving

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding the new chatbots, with some people predicting their success and others doubting their potential. Despite this, it is difficult to ignore the conversation around them. Companies are not waiting around, but have aggressively sought to adopt these new technologies.

Apple, for example, is looking to replace human narrators for Audio Books, according to The Guardian.

These attempts will intensify, but will they work? Sort of. When I worked in radio, there was an attempt to replace on-air talent with pre-recorded content.

When stations measured what caused people to change channels, they found that the number one cause was when on-air talent started speaking. Not surprisingly, there was a huge move to get rid of on-air hosts and replace them with automated DJs. It didn't work. Why?

The on-air talent are valuable—representing the radio station, marketing to customers for an event, or, at a remote, asking people to come see them at a business. Replacing people with automation meant that was no longer possible. Humans have an inherent and irreplaceable value.

In another shift towards AI, Microsoft is planning to transform the search engine, Bing, into a generative AI-powered platform according to Reuters.

I think this is the first real challenge to something like Google in quite a while. If you haven't used ChatGPT or Copilot, it's better than searching for certain things than Google. Google has improved its search engine with AI in the past, but the new Chat Bots are clearly superior.

Today Microsoft launched You.com, a new, privacy-focused search engine with a twist...a built in chatbot you can ask questions to. This uses a large language model like ChatGPT. We'll see whether this is the answer to dethroning Google or a step in that direction. Whatever the case, companies are quickly making adjustments and so should you.

How to Future-Proof Yourself

I'm old enough to remember when the web started to dominate business. The first time the internet went out in one of the TV stations I worked in, work-zombies walked in the hallway who could no longer do their job without the net.

Think of it like performance enhancers in sports. The problem with trying to stay 'natural' is that if everyone else is enhanced, you're at a competitive disadvantage.

Embrace Early Adoption

Be an early adopter. Get yourself a Chat GPT account. Check out Dall-e-2. Take a peek at Hugging Face and start experimenting. During the break, I used Chat GPT to help me create a library for one of my projects. Did it work?

Yep...and Nope. In the beginning stages it showed me some reasonably functional code that made me think of where I needed to go.

Here are some of the problems. It misinterpreted what I meant by an H1. In markdown, you create a level one headline by using a hashtag character (#). So, it tried to import another library called "marked" to convert the markdown to HTML so it could then convert the literal H1 instead of just using grep to translate the markdown file after reading it.

As I persisted in my efforts, I realized that I was engaging in a conversation with the bot. The back-and-forth dialogue helped me to troubleshoot and rethink the question.

I realized that I needed to communicate more clearly about what I was asking. So in a way, the AI was training me in how to ask questions...not a bad thing. This is one area where you might need to get better at asking the right questions.

I've been using GitHub's Copilot for months to make suggestions on code and I've been doing a lot less searches on the web. It's good enough to suggest some decent alternatives. Combined with IntelliSense (VS Code suggestion AI), it's just a better way to code.

Look for opportunities

The new companies that are taking advantage of these models can create viable products that leverage the AIs. Something like Chat GPT has an API that you can use in an application. There are huge opportunities for turning the APIs into something tangible.

One of the breakout applications, for example, has been Lensa AI app from Prisma Labs. It uses the open source Stable Diffusion model, according to Tech Crunch. They have amassed 22.2 million worldwide downloads and almost $29 million in consumer spending since its launch in 2018.

There are always security and privacy concerns with any new apps, especially those that you upload photos to, but companies as well as careers are built around executing on opportunities.

Question is, how are you going to use these technologies in 2023 and beyond? I think you should forget about computers taking over your next job and worry more about enhanced humans taking advantage of these tools. Like the old joke says, the competition doesn't have to outrun a bear, they just have to outrun you.