Let’s talk ai and digital technology again. Maybe I should write it ‘Ai’ because it’s all artificial and not intelligent. Every one of you should be alert to what’s going on. I’ve been reading, thinking, listening to some smart people. Here’s my advice for everyone, especially the “non-techy” among us.
Nobody can predict the direction of ai. Let go of the idea that you’re going to figure out where this is all going. That’s not your job. Pay attention without being anxious. Use ai where it’s helpful. Experiment and evaluate. If an ai assistant or tool can improve your work, use it to improve your work. Don’t automatically trust an ai. “A chatbot is not an oracle. It’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate.” (Neal Stephenson, brilliant sci-fi author) Test everything, hold fast to what is good.
I can confidently say that the idea of uploading your consciousness to ‘the cloud’ so you’ll live forever will not happen. Why? No one has successfully defined consciousness in engineering terms that could be implemented. Also, I’ve worked with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft cloud services –oh boy — I’d never trust them to manage the technology platform of my ‘consciousness.’ I’m not even sure how they would price such a service.
‘Uploading your consciousness’ is already happening in this way: At least half our population seems to have abdicated their critical thinking to somebody or some service online. A friend says I’m half-right, they’ve only outsourced their thinking, but I see a full-on abdication. I observe people surrendering their creativity and curiosity to a “Great and Powerful Oz!” I don’t want you to be in that group.
There are many roles and some jobs manipulating data and information which will be largely replaced by ai assistants. Once again, we’ll go through business shifts which will forever alter what will be life-wage paying jobs. Internet-based commerce obliterated travel agencies and newspapers. Yet travel and news consumption are at all-time highs. Film cameras are a rare specialty item, yet people take more pictures than ever. Algorithms replaced thousands of stock traders, banking employees, and financial advisors, but there’s more money movement than ever. We pack so many services into our glowing pocket screen devices that no one can sell old devices like a car GPS unit anymore. [The component that makes GPS in your phone possible is about the size of a grain of rice.] Internet-based commerce destroyed the marketing strategies of the TV age, and now ai will destroy most of the wage-paying roles in the digital marketing age. I know a business owner who replaced his 5-person virtual digital marketing team with a collection of ai bots he created using a $20/month GPT4 subscription. He’s no tech wizard, either. Business and commerce will expand, but the jobs will dramatically shift for every role which is at least 60% digital. Here is an interesting milestone: Amazon’s Kindle submission process now requires you to state if you used ai to create your book.
This is an era where people will figure out that they’re in a different business now. We’ve seen emergent economic systems many times in history. The dominant passenger train businesses in the early 1900’s didn’t make the transition to cars and airplanes, because they saw themselves in the train business, not the people transportation business. These ai tools will trigger new transitions, and anyone clinging too tightly to their business model might find themselves holding a scrapbook of what once was. Much of the initial profit will be made by people selling the ‘picks and shovels’ to the gold miners dreaming of the big strike. Then the business ecosystems accelerate and grow, and new profit sources become available.
Maybe some people will have enough smarts with authority (few in authority have the smarts) to restrict or shape what happens with ai. But for you and me? Forget about stopping ai. That’s not our job. Our job is to figure out what we will do, as individuals, in our families and communities, in our businesses, next.
The history of technological advances is that we see the benefits quickly, and then it takes a much longer time to understand the downsides. The inevitable consequence of ai tools, like all technologies, will be more extreme 80/20 distributions. Unequal distributions will continue. I am not saying the bottom gets worse; on the contrary, technological change is a tide that lifts all boats, and is a dominant factor in why the poor today are economically richer than ever before in history. I’m optimistic that ai tutors can democratize education opportunities for more people worldwide. The unequal part is the top, growing faster than ever. The evolving ai toolset amplifies the money, influence, power, and capability of some much more than others.
[Small sidebar: Are you teaching your children about 80/20 thinking and behaving? We either master 80/20 or it masters us.]
You might think, “But these tools are buggy. ChatGPT hallucinates.” Yep. Do you remember what the first iPod and iPhone were like, before there was a universe of apps, with the first-generation camera? Remember what open-source software was like in the 1990’s? The Amazon of 1996 is a tiny speck of what Amazon is today, an organization so digitized that an employee directly interacting with a customer is a defect that must be fixed with a digital solution. There is every economic incentive to make ai tools better.
In general, the better the ai tools become, the more human we must become. Let us continue to be savvy people using ai as tools lest 99% of us become tools for those exploiting ai.
We’re past a point where we must re-think privacy (again). The metadata of everything we’re doing online continues to accumulate and will be exploited. We can’t be foolish – don’t share information with an ai that you wouldn’t want known widely. Tech platforms must be responsible actors. I don’t like it, but it’s easier than ever for a bad actor to attack you, to make your life very difficult. These technologies give statists enormous power. This has significant implications with our laws and policies for cash. Since human beings are still fundamentally human beings, even in this age of exponential change, worry more about “who” is using ai and why, than trying to understand how it all works. Perhaps the best way to live is to behave as if you’re always under observation. There is nothing anonymous in this universe.
Going forward, we must teach people about digital technology limits, rather than passively allowing bad messaging to dominate. Here’s the starting point: Use digital technologies to help you with analysis, pattern recognition, or simplifying a task. Do not abdicate your human responsibility for discerning meaning and making moral judgments. Digital technologies are neither sentient nor conscious, and whatever agency they appear to have has been programmed.
We begin our humanity apprenticeship in our childhood. Therefore, I am open to discussions about restrictions on smartphones and social media for children, just as we set age limits on alcohol and driving. I’m not advocating prolonged adolescence – we have too much of this now. I’m advocating to protect children and give them every opportunity to become their best.
I’m encouraged by people responding to the crisis of meaning in their lives by asking spiritual questions. Apparently, many people are using chatbots like a spiritual mentor or coach. That’s unlikely to be fruitful, though this is evidence of hole-in-the-heart hunger that God will use to bring people to Himself. God communicates with his creatures, not the tools his creatures create. God loves his creatures, not their tools, and holds his creatures accountable.
The most influential leaders in our future will be the most human, not the most machine-like. They’ll be religious, because that will be appealing, and they’ll have a moral framework for making difficult decisions. They’ll be savvy at using tools without being used by tools. Being a good communicator is insufficient; they must be good at connecting with others. We resonate with deep people, skilled and competent, but not with machines. Some will be more like pastoral guides, and others more like special forces team leaders.
There’s a whole movement now discouraging teenagers from doing part-time, entry-level jobs at fast-food joints, retail shops, etc. Some say these jobs are demeaning. Some say that these teenagers are taking jobs from adults or shouldn’t be getting the same minimum-wage as needy adults. Maybe, but that’s missing the big value proposition. I’m thinking about these typical entry jobs for teenagers another way: this is the minor-leagues to prepare players for the big leagues. These are the positions where a teenager learns to show up on time, work when you don’t feel like it, get along with other employees and a boss that you might not always like, learn how to interact with customers, solve problems as they come up, learn what it takes to make a sale, etc. Those skills are incredibly valuable in an age of ai acceleration. Those experiences aren’t going to be taught by an ai, nor fully replaced by an ai.
And for adults in a workforce? Imagination. Creativity. Innovation and optimization leveraging knowledge and experience from other industries. Negotiating deals, finding value propositions. Physical craftsmanship. Delighting customers. Making moral judgments. Developing the skills of others, especially the next generations. Putting meaning into products and services. Joy. Artistry. Personal connections.
I’m hopeful despite the daunting changes fostered by ai and whatever tools we invent next. Pessimism and abdication will not help us.
What does your heart tell you?
