Living with Digital Uncertainty

It starts in grade school.

When you know the answer to your teacher's question and raise your hand.

You hear your name being called and sense all the other eyes in class are on you.

You feel both confident and nervous, take take a breath and offer your response.

There's a momentary silence before the verdict comes down and you realize you'll either feel elated if you're correct, or dejected if you're wrong.

We're conditioned from an early age to want to get things right.

To have the perfect answer.

But What If There's More Than One?

Of course, once you start working you realize that for so many questions, there are no simple and straightforward answers.

Say you're tasked with writing a piece of content, you might wonder if your idea is any good. Will it capture the imagination of the audience you're trying to reach? Will it inspire them to action? Will they read and share?

The answer depends on so many external factors and considerations, that you can't—with any degree of certainty—determine the outcome.

Instead of the comfortable and binary world of yes or no, right or wrong, you need to embrace uncertainty.

And that's never easy to do.

Ultimately, it's all comes down to the predictions you make from the information that's available.

Some responses offer a larger degree of confidence than others. And we use our intellect and emotions to help us find them.

Yet our answers are often far from perfect. They're simply guesses. We do our best with the data at hand.

Perhaps that's why we're expecting so much from artificial intelligence. We want it to give us a definitive response.

But it never does and we end up with an imperfect prediction instead.

Written by a Human, Not a Machine

Which helps explain why many of the outputs we get from AI systems just aren't up to scratch. They're statistical predictions.

Still, they are improving. In this week's Digital Marketing Trends video, I talk about three AI developments that could have an impact on marketing and communications in 2022:

1. Natural language generation: AI applications that write copy and are being commercialized and available to test and try. Some of them are getting pretty good and can be used for brainstorms and idea generation. But are you ready to relinquish part of your creative writing process to a machine?
2. Multi-modal AI: Algorithms that integrate natural language processing (text) and computer vision (image recognition) to match a visual to words that describe it and vice versa and could be useful with multimedia storytelling. What will that do to the writer/art director collaboration?
3. Immersive experiences (AKA the metaverse): There's so much hype about the metaverse these days and we need to sort through what it currently does versus what we're being promised. Yet, as we spend more time in front of our screens, we should consider what types of enhancements we'll need to work together virtually in a more natural way.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Connect With Martin

And with that, I am 100% certain we've come to the end of issue #46.

How do you deal with uncertainty and working in an environment where there's no simple answers to anything, just predictions? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Be sure to reach out if you have questions about any of the videos in Digital Marketing Trends, or my other?LinkedIn Learning courses .

And if you want to find me, follow me on?LinkedIn ?or?Twitter .

Or visit?my?my website ?and send a message or a question.

You might also enjoy the?Inside PR ?podcast I co-host with?Gini Dietrich?and?Joe Thornley.

And speaking of ideas, if you've got any you'd like me to cover in my next newsletter, be sure to send them my way.

Thank you again for reading and subscribing!

I predict we'll be seeing each other again in two weeks.