AI is the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The rise of automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). These are all terms that have been thrown around in recent years, and for good reason.
As technology continues to advance at an exponential rate, it’s no surprise that there is a growing concern about the impact of AI on our society. Will robots take over our jobs? Will they surpass human intelligence?
In the vast and winding narrative of human progress, AI has become a plot twist that we can’t ignore.
This isn’t the first time we’ve stood at the crossroads of technological advancement; the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the Internet are similar in their revolutionary potential. Yet, this time is different. This time, the transformation is personal, deeply ingrained in our lives without fanfare or explanation, and often without our explicit consent.
A brief history of AI
If we rewind to the mid-20th century, AI was a lofty aspiration of a few visionaries. They imagined machines capable of thought, a concept that in a few short decades has leapt from the pages of science fiction into the fabric of our daily lives. In the initial explorations into AI, the code barely passed as “thoughtful,” but today it has an eerie, radiant intelligence.
Yet, for all the exponential growth, even the most advanced AI available today is not truly “thoughtful” or “intelligent” in the way we understand those terms. It’s not cognitive; it doesn’t ponder, from anything we could objectively measure.
What it is, is a meticulous pattern recognition machine fed by mountains of data. It identifies patterns in data far more complex than any human could spot. It learns and adapts, or rather, it evolves.
The year everything changed…
In 2023, the release of Chat GPT, saw AI shift from being a tech tool sitting somewhere in the background, to becoming a personal companion.
Chat GPT is truly amazing – its exchanges are often indistinguishable from human-generated text.
It’s eloquent, at times funny, reassuringly familiar in its imperfections. These conversations underpin the sheer computational power and trillions of words it has digested.
For businesses, it’s a disruptive technology. Customer service chatbots, once a source of comedic frustration, now handle queries with nuance and efficiency.
The lines blur further in content creation, where AI collaborates with writers, generating drafts of pieces like this. AI now possesses coherence and resonance without the requirement of a human hand.
AI is unseen and everywhere…
Observing AI from a distance is like trying to comprehend the ocean from the shore—you only see the horizon.
In our daily routines, AI operates quietly, the orchestra conductor of so many tasks. There’s AI in our home appliances, our fitness trackers, our car engines. Siri places calls, sets reminders and so on. It’s everywhere and yet, nowhere. Invisible yet irreplaceable.
Charting an ethical course
The question isn’t whether we should use AI. That would be like questioning whether we should use the internet. The real question is how we should use it.
Already in the hands of scammers and fraudsters, AI will develop faster than most of us can ever imagine.
There’s a huge debate raging about the ethical use of AI, and it will require the goodwill of our technology giants to chart this course. The government is too slow and too inflexible to respond to the speed of change as it’s rolled out.
When I was in Sweden last year for our GAIA conference a panel of experts were already questioning whether we could reign in AI so that it is only used for good.
Future of AI
A Day in the Life in the Early 2030s
Your AI assistant goes through your calendar and talks to your other electronic devices to plan your day while you sleep. With an eye on your sleep cycles, it wakes you at a time when you will feel most refreshed—within a window of time you’ve previously approved. It monitors your health vitals to make sure you’re in top shape.
As you get ready for your day, your assistant briefs you on any news or social media it deems relevant. It outlines your meetings and suggests the best time to leave the house based on traffic. It’s already ordered autonomous transport for you. Your first meeting of the day is virtual with a team from Korea. You take it using mixed reality glasses and join your colleagues in a virtual boardroom. Everything spoken in Korean is simultaneously translated for you without delay.
Throughout the day, your virtual assistant is drafting your emails, which are always near perfect. All you have to do is approve them. Your assistant has also drafted 5 reports, a patent application you’re excited about, and served you lunch and a snack based on what’s optimal for your current blood chemistry. As you walk into your home at the end of the day, the music is playing the perfect tune to lift your spirits. It notifies you that dinner is arriving in 20 minutes and suggests a fun comedy routine by your favourite comedian to pass the time.
From Peter H. Diamandis
Imagine a world where the AI in your car doesn’t just direct you but anticipates when you’re low on fuel and navigates to the nearest station. An even more likely scenario will be fully autonomous EVs. You won’t need to own a car.
It’s a future where medical AI diagnoses you before you know you’re sick, with precision ranging from cellular mutation to socioeconomic predispositions.
As I consider the use of AI for Capital Partners, I am filled with excitement at the possibilities. In the short term, it will vastly improve the experience of our team members and clients by eliminating frustrating and manual tasks. Longer term though, it has the potential to eliminate many roles in our business, and indeed across all industries.
AI is reshaping society and it will spawn new business opportunities and create enormous wealth. It may also help us solve many of the existential threats we humans have bestowed upon ourselves.
“The most intelligent inhabitants of that future world won’t be men or monkeys, they will be machines, the remote descendants of today’s computers. Now the present-day electronic brains are complete morons, but this will not be true in another generation. They will start to think, and eventually, they will completely outthink their makers.”
“Is this depressing? I don’t see why it should be. We superseded the Cro-Magnon and the Neanderthal man, and we presume we are an improvement. I think we should regard it as a privilege to be stepping stones to higher things. I suspect that organic or biological evolution has about come to its end, and we are now at the beginning of inorganic or mechanical evolution, which will be thousands of times swifter.”
Arthur C. Clark | Author of 2001 A Space Odyssey (he made this prediction in 1964)
For a much deeper dive into AI check out my favourite source Dr Peter Diamandis.
