Tech Talk #1
Seth Godin said something in a recent podcast. He said that AI will soon feel like electricity did when it was invented. Everything will be powered or enhanced by AI so much that it will feel like talking about Electricity, a now basic necessity for all modern life. ChatGPT already feels very basic to people, everyone is amazed at what Large Language Models can do, but no one is asking where they should stop using AI in everything. It’s like Google now, no one is special or doing special things for using a Search Engine, it’s just a basic part of life now.
Although Artificial General Intelligence is something that needs to be pursued. Sam Altman claims that Open Ai now “Knows how to build AGI”, so is might be just a matter of if they will try it or not. AGI is basically the tipping point (or cliff) that AI can become “Self Aware”, meaning it can teach itself anything it needs to know, almost human type of intelligence. When it goes over that cliff, that’s what everyone is scared of, meaning there’s no going back from that point.
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I do offer a counter argument though to all the Doomers saying that we might as well bow to our robot overlords already.
Do we fear Electricity? Are we worried the whole earth will be electrified? Are we worried Electricity will go and make more Electricity? Computers don’t care about themselves, they are logical machines meant to calculate data.
This is called the “No Conscious AI” Theory. It’s based in the fact the fundamental nature of a computer (Digital Processing) is inherently incapable of replicating the complex biological mechanisms that underpin consciousness in living organisms. Can someone push a button and launch a weapon? Maybe.
Would an AI?
Well even if it was allowed to, why would it want to?
I think AI will cause many good things to be discovered in our lifetimes. Bad Actors might use AI to do bad things to other people, perhaps scam people out of their money with AI Celebrity Videos. Bad Actors could even use AI to hacker vulnerable systems, but still, that’s crime committed by a Human. No one is going to prosecute a computer or a USB Drive.
I do think one thing that will change really soon because of AI is how we work. Covid-19 really changed our way of thinking about how to do knowledge work. I’ve been working in the Tech Industry for 20+ years. I knew how backward companies were in regards to updating their systems. Everyone of them have been using 15 year old software to run their most important systems. A very similar cascade to the Internet Boom will take place when AI is offered to improve these legacy systems. It will literally be the gold rush of our times.
Once Covid-19 hit, it became do or die. It changed everyone’s Business perspective seemingly overnight. Working from Home became a viable economic option, and that wouldn’t have happened if the cloud wasn’t such a mature innovation by then. Software got cheaper the more it got used. The default for meetings became a Zoom call, because everyone no matter where they were could be on a Zoom call, and they didn’t transmit diseases to everyone while talking. The video chat became the baseline communication method for meetings, and honestly, I’d thought that would’ve taken another 20 years to get there if it wasn’t for the Pandemic.
There’s a huge economic opportunity for anyone willing to become Ai Engineering and Implementation Experts. The companies have the data to make Ai a great tool for themselves, but they do not have the experience or knowledge to make sense of that data, that’s where your opportunity as a STEM Professional comes in, data is our fuel, we live off data.
So if anything, AI will keep getting better, we’ll adapt our current Businesses to take advantage of it and use it to get better at serving customers. One day we might have a robot cook and dishwasher in our kitchen, but first we’d probably need to figure out how to retrieve our Doordash order out of the malfunctioning self driving car first before we worry about robot cook attacking us in our sleep because we told him the omelet he served us wasn’t all that good.
Until Tomorrow,
Jason Ziebarth (Founder Club255)
JZ#373