The march of Artificial Intelligence
The early use of business intelligence in organisations led to excellent analysis of situations, often presented in an understandable format. However, the real value of AI was felt when businesses moved from reactive to proactive uses.
It’s time for all intelligent humans to think deeply about the future and ensure that some balance is maintained
There is probably no educated person in the world today who has not heard of artificial intelligence. What started as expert systems many decades ago with new ways of problem solving embedded into computing capabilities has evolved into computers first assisting humans in simple problem solving to augmenting human ability to think through more complex problems by serving up relevant data, aiding in decision making.
In recent months, as extensive use of machine learning to enrich the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) has created a new science called Generative AI and brought software tools like Chat GPT to the fore, it is worth thinking about where the world of scientific and artistic endeavour is headed.
In simple terms, the early use of business intelligence in organisations led to excellent analysis of situations, often presented in an understandable format. However, the real value of AI was felt when businesses moved from reactive to proactive uses. Evolving from mere descriptive uses, feeding machine learning back into the AI algorithms gave machines the power to be predictive and even prescriptive. As the joke goes, an application like Amazon knows immediately when a person has a cold based on the orders for medicine placed and an application like Facebook could actually predict when the person might get a cold based on pictures posted of some crazy dance in the rain.
Why is Generative AI different? As Chat GPT has shown in its early days, the ability to create a poem, a song or even a painting can today come close to the work of a human mind and with enough time to soak in ML-led improvements, can enable lazy humans to delegate intellectual pursuits like writing books or movie scripts entirely to Generative AI. Today, a human needs to provide prompts and course correct to make the output of generative AI meaningful but that can change dramatically in the days to come, served by exponential growth in technology capabilities. Will human intervention in all creative work eventually be restricted to just designing a generative model and delegate all generation work to AI without any further human machine interfaces?
A look at the uses of generative AI that could emerge in the next few months will make its relevance clear. Generating complete operating processes for a new production line or service activity, personalising the marketing messages to identified customers or prospects, writing and reviewing programming code, answering complex legal questions and drafting all types of stakeholder communications are all low hanging fruit. In more complex areas, the multi-step drug discovery process in the pharma industry and even question papers generated for academic use based on the understanding of the learner could become commonplace. With more and more AI applications in all areas of business, academia and society emerging and the possibility of a 15 trillion-dollar boost to global GDP, equal to the current total GDP of China, it is not difficult to understand why it took Chat GPT only five days to reach a million users compared to three years and more for Netflix and two years for Twitter.
The new force that is being unleashed by Generative AI is moving us out of the comfort zone and threatening a deep disruption to the way we work, act and even think in future. The movie “Matrix” warned us decades ago that humans will one day live in a bubble where they feel they are leading normal lives but in reality their brains would be feeding data to and getting instructions from smart machines. Reader may recall the initial scare that autonomous AI would result in humans being replaced completely in many job functions. With the potential of AI being seen to be far more than just automation, the bigger scare today could be the role that human beings will play in future when their thinking and creativity itself is pre-empted by Generative AI.
In the next five years, large deep learning solutions and neural networks , enhanced by the power of quantum computing and 5G can write books and movies, guide strategic decisions of artistic and business folk and match if not exceed their cognitive capabilities.. If any and every scenario in the manufacturing or services segment can be handled by machines, including the simulation of production processes in manufacturing and the prediction and even the influencing of audience response in the case of creative pursuits, is it possible that humans will happily be guided by the decisions of machines with generative AI telling them what to watch or hear and eventually how to think?
This new development is not just an enhancement to AI like Machine Learning has become and conversational Bots and other tools are progressing towards. Generative AI will get better and better as it makes its early mistakes and struggles in competitive examinations because of inadequate knowledge bases in the initial stages but over a period of time (and that period could be just a few months), machines can easily outperform humans with all our distractions and inherent reluctance to change. It’s time for all intelligent humans to think deeply about the future and ensure that some balance is maintained!