Planning: less artificial, more intelligent
“It’s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts” said Earl Weaver.? Still learning, there must be 50 plus types of planning in business.?? Scenario, supply chain, financial, optimisation planning … it’s a long list.? When you think you are searching using Google, perhaps it’s Google searching you??? In the age of artificial intelligence [AI] and surveillance capitalism, has the observer, become the observed?? Are we on the brink of a brave new world, or risk facing eventual extinction, if AI gets out of control?
AI is a game changer across industries, a genuine paradigm shift, shifting our notion of planning, and just about everything else. In a recent interview with Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, Elon Musk referred to AI as ‘smarter than any human’.? Interestingly, if you ask ChapGPT if this is true, it gives a Manchurian candidate like, diplomatic considered, balanced response.
“AI and humans possess different types of intelligence, and it's not accurate to make a blanket statement that one is inherently ‘smarter’ than the other. Let's break down the differences:? AI excels at specific tasks and can outperform humans in areas such as data analysis, pattern recognition, and repetitive tasks. Humans have general intelligence, allowing them to adapt to a wide range of tasks, think critically, and exhibit creativity” states the freely available AI tool.
From 1760 to 1840, the English Industrial Revolution replaced human labour with machines.?? Today, AI has the potential to transcend the limitations of the human mind, able to analyze masses of data in the time of a flickering eye. In the nine decades, from the time of the beginning of the Industrial Revolution economic historians report real wages went down thanks to automation.? Automation is simply capital replacing human labour.??
AI:? Cuddly friend or fatal threat?
Today, there are two schools of thought on automation through AI.? One is pessimistic, that AI will make a whole category of repetitive tedious jobs redundant, and that real wages, and household incomes risk dropping, as has happened in communities in Michigan in the US, home of the once big 3 car makers, GM, Ford and Chrysler - where legions of car workers have been largely replaced by AI powered robots.?? Second scenario, is a touch more optimistic, believing that the economy has always been characterised by jobs disappearing, being replaced by others, requiring new knowledge and skills.? Here the belief is that AI is a ‘blip on the screen’ and the employers and the labour market just have to evolve and adapt.
When Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press in 1440 it opened up a world of learning and possibilities to the common person.? Almost 600 years later, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk, all voracious eclectic readers, still ?benefit from the work of the German inventor.?? ?
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But unlike the invention of the printing press, electronic calculator, or an Excel spreadsheet, AI is developing so fast that the concern is that it can soon think for itself.? Something your smart phone can’t do.
Leading the charge, with concerns about the possible profound impact of AI is ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Hariri, who believes AI is an alien threat that could wipe us out: “Instead of coming from outer space, it’s coming from California” says the thinker, who views history, as the study of change.
Billions of dollars are?being poured into the development of AI, with the technology being hailed as a “revolution” - but the historian and philosopher sees it as an “alien species” that could trigger humanity’s extinction.
Social media companies, with their [press the ‘like’ icon] addictive free products, have become the giants that risk further dominating our world, with access to tremendous amounts of data about us.? Their ability to provide an in great demand free service and then collect data that can monetized, and sold back to advertisers is a stroke of well, perhaps not genius, but an interesting move. This ability to know more about us, than we know about ourselves, has been for these tech giants, the source of the ultimate creation of wealth.
Pushing the warning button, Harvard academic Shoshanna Zuboff believes? that a business model based on ‘surveillance capitalism’ "unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data [which] are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence', and fabricated into prediction products.”
Lesson learned:? As we plan for 2024, clearly, we don’t know it all.
David - [email protected]?is a director at aCatalyst Consulting.