What do humans, AI and paper clips have in common?

Swedish philosopher, Nick Bostrom in 2003 talked about how humans, with AI could innocently bring an end to the world

Referred to as the “paperclip maximizer scenario”

Imagine a company that creates paperclips and the company tells the AI to think of ways to create more paper clips to sell

Nick explains, “Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.”?

The AI also builds rockets to go into space and colonize more planets as this creates a need for more paper clips?

While this is a simple example, the paperclip maximizer scenario is a great metaphor to illustrate the dangers of creating superintelligent machines without knowing how to program and take into account overall human safety

What does this mean to sales and marketing?

It also reminds us that AI dosen't have human values and regardless how much we think we can “automate” the selling process, if we do we dehumanize the process

Now I'm not anti-AI, I use it everyday, (I wrote this myself BTW without the need for AI) and I totally get we are we happy to put up with bots to to a certain extent

When I contact my mobile (cell) phone company, there are many simple tasks I can sort through the chatbot and I'm happy to do this

From a buyer's perspective this could be doing our own research before buying

Our client BMW, the German car company, know that whenever a customer walks through the door of a showroom, that customer will know more than the BMW salesperson. ?BMW have worked out that they cannot teach everything about every car to every salesperson

But in the world of B2B, (unless you sell a commodity) we will always want to talk to somebody

Even my recent podcast, link here, which predicts the end to websites, SEO, Google search and email marketing all because of AI, states that a buyer will still have to talk to a seller, will want a relationship with a seller and will want to trust that seller

In fact AI make relationships and trust more important?

So while there are plenty of people selling the “easy button” with lots of AI apps to sell, we need to understand that in an AI world, the most human company wins?

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