2Ai or Not 2aI

Pune, Maharashtra India, 17 January 2024, 10:10 pm:

Being a compulsive writer and inquisitive busybody, I probe and query all that I encounter, asking questions, answering them, and then asking again after time passes. 

That is likely to stop (in the very near future) if I were 2Ai full on. For what is human intelligence if not the ability to incessantly query, to chase after the impossible, to keep doing and creating and dismantling and rebuilding till an answer is found or you are dead. 2 morbid? It’s real.

The inherent challenge with AI/ML is that they are built to make human thought and action redundant, and to direct how humans should think, work and eventually behave. 

In June 2023, futurist, coach and author Bernard Marr wrote a column in Forbes.com on the 15 biggest risks of artificial intelligence. Precise, well constructed, the list highlights various types of risks. No. 7 on Marr’s list would be No.1 on mine and I would call it ‘Loss of Cognitive Abilities’ rather than Dependence on AI. No 8 on the list is ‘Job Displacement’ and if you are not sure how real that is, give it a thought. From late 2022 and throughout 2023, I kept reading reports of job losses due to AI, but the one that made me sit up was software programmers losing their jobs. Why? Because three successful senior programmers I know lost their income to sudden redundancy.  

Why hadn’t I seen that coming? That was my question to myself. It was logical to assess right at the beginning that when you pursue a path of automating processes, the process of automating would automate the automator as well (eventually).

This week, the International Monetary Fund and PwC released more specific predictions related to AI. Kristalina Georgieva (current Managing Director of the IMF) wrote a pertinent blog post on January 14, highlighting the exposure of jobs to AI (40% jobs worldwide have high exposure to AI, 60% in advanced economies), specially high-skilled jobs. The post is a balanced one, looking at risks, opportunities and underlining the need to adopt a holistic humane policy as we adopt AI.

I am not sure how exciting it is going to be as tech companies integrate more and more AI into their services, forcing us to think less and less. But it’s exciting for business from all accounts, as is evident from PwC’s post this week on the ‘2024 AI Business Predictions’ (based on their ‘2023 Emerging Technology Survey’). According to the post, 73% of US companies have adopted AI in some for or the other. And Generative AI is redefining not just employee work but also the work of managers and those in leadership roles. 

So that’s three of the many articles I read recently on AI. How does that help me with my decision? And that is the thing about learning. We gather information, consume opinions, make some conclusions, take some decisions, look at the results, learn from the results, recalibrate our conclusions, revisit decisions and so on. There is a lot of information and opinion on AI and its impact. But can I act upon or raise my blood pressure on account of everything I read? Can I ignore AI and move on? Can I embrace AI and move on?

The real question is: Am I going to use AI or will I get used by AI?  

(I created the digital art accompanying this article with the help of an AI-based tool from a source photograph I shot).