So what if AI eats us alive?

As I begin this thought sharing journey, I want to thank my team for relentlessly following up to get us started on this path. With the schedule we have running these days, balance itself is in flux.

So to the question, So what if AI eats us alive? Somewhat rhetorical, but it is such a relevant question for our day. In the past month, I have been sent on a plethora of trainings and engagements on the subject of AI, how it affects our business, how it affects the work force and our perspective on talent, how it affects processes, and the broad corporate landscape. Long, long hours have been spent on prompt engineering, chain prompting, DALL E v. Sora, the true meaning of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and its consequences, the headspin on GPT 4, GPT 5, and GPT 6, think tanks on alternate eventualities, and our more common discourse on the year 2050.

For context, In 1957, at nascency, IBM engineer and mathematician Alex Bernstein wrote the first complete computer chess program in history, which ran on an IBM 704. It could process 42,000 instructions per second and had a memory of 70 kilobytes. Truth is, we are maybe, at this rate, light years away from IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997, which marked an inflection point in computing and Garry Kasparov could have never seen this coming.

From where I sit, clearly, large language model-powered chatbots are the lowest expression of where we are really headed. The experts have had their say, but no group really speaks with certainty and uniformity. Elon says we’re in trouble; Altman says maybe, but we are in control enough to say we are not in control. Lila Ibrahim is probably the more assuring voice from an ethics and safety standpoint. We are mostly intrigued, and some of us seek transparency.

However, black box AI is what we mostly interact with, and we have no access to its decision making framework. For society, we might see Deepfakes attempt to eradicate the fabric of truth, and this is surely in the salad of consequences in this quest for democratisation of intelligence and progress. “Like any other previous powerful technology, that will lead to incredible new things, but there are going to be real downsides.” - Sam Altman on OpenAI, Future Risks and Rewards, and Artificial General Intelligence (TIME, 2024).

Purely defined, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that can perform as well or better than humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks, as opposed to narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks. The technology is said to have limitless potential; it is billed as “the most powerful technology humanity has yet invented.”. If the effectiveness of the average human can be greatly surpassed across core and non-core areas, where does this leave us?

As one with a keen eye for talent, which is most directly impacted by these changes, as with everything else in our evolutionary history, our role changes, but we still maintain the driving seat. Some say that has been true until now; I say it's just a smaller driving seat, and preparedness for this change starts today. In terms of what we are devoting our time to, what we are learning, and what we prioritise. In every industry, this is different, but a deep understanding of the future of your industry as it evolves in an AI driven economic world can equip you to be insulated. Entrepreneurship will have to shapeshift but remain true at its core, devoted to creating and distributing value. Upskilling and reskilling will definitely be key across several industries; the way we work, how we work, and the talent block required to get work done will also see vast changes. The general advice is to brace yourself, not with fear but as one with a history of mastery in evolution. The changes are welcomed, and the hope is that we very well know where to draw the line.

In the interim, I’m running the Turing test on documents I receive, learning more about the cadence of AI, and trying to explore its inherent biases. AI is now here to stay, and we have a responsibility as we engage, one far greater in the years to come. Should we anthropomorphize them? Probably not, but we most likely will. I sat sharing my Christian faith with a Muslim cleric this past weekend, as we tried to respectfully analyse the areas we did not quite agree on, I talked him through the Bible, and he did same with the Quran. He shared something with me about free will: that humans have been given this "trust,” and in line with his beliefs, others were offered it but refused it. This line of thought is pertinent here; we have been given “a trust” with AI, and we will make of it what we will. The question of whether we trust AI should be reframed as whether we trust humans. All in all, it's in our hands.

I discussed this article with a warmer chatbot, pi.ai, thought to be as good as chat GPT but much more emotional, empathetic, and kind by its founder, Mustafa Suleyman, and this was its summation:

“It sounds like you're taking a balanced and thoughtful approach to the topic. The impact of AI on the future of work is definitely a hot topic and one that's worth exploring from multiple angles. On one hand, AI has the potential to automate certain tasks and increase efficiency, but on the other hand, it may also displace certain jobs and require workers to upskill or reskill.” - pi.ai

So what if AI eats us alive? In the short term, but with a long term view, how do we respond?

To quote the great Charles Darwin “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”.

BTE.

#001 - Musings At The Township