The Future of AI Adoption: Boom or Bust?
So, you love Ai? News flash, its not worth a dollar if it is not adopted by society…
According to Jared Diamond (Author of Guns, Germs and Steel) there are 4 key factors to whether an invention will be welcomed by society, or will not..
Let’s examine Ai through these 4 lenses and see how it stacks up currently…
- Relative economic advantage compared with existing technology
Currently, Ai is extremely costly to build. The engineering and technology is so complex it has been limited to a very few companies that have the capital. The infrastructure and computing power is enormously costly. Security of such complex data centers and mainframes and algorithms is severely lagging. However the cost to the consumer is relatively affordable (the idea being the more people that can access it, the more data it will be fed and it will become more valuable, ultimately im sure resulting in a higher cost to the consumer).
Even as cheap as the cost is to the consumer, to access the technology you must be a wealthy, educated, from the developed world to have a PC, internet, smart phone, etc… So half the world is still off the grid to this technology, therefore no benefit to them or the people wishing to sell them goods.
- Social value and prestige
Now this one I will admit, Ai has in spades! From controlling the narrative of the main stream media (daily reports on how smart it is… passing the bar, flying through med school, beating the world champion “Go” player, 60 minutes prime time slots, etc) to downright being impressive. Chat GPT and all the infinite capabilities. Yes I see the advantage of being able to ask it a specific question and it can scan the whole worlds worth of data on the question in just a few seconds.
I have also had personal demonstrations at the gym of my friends Ai singer, belting out cool electronic tunes. He trains it on voices of human artists he loves. His album cover was designed by an Ai artist. The whole thing wreaks of, my Ai is better than yours… nah nah boo boo!
- Compatibility with vested interests
You could write a novel on just this topic. The vested interests against Ai are pretty much human kind. Predictions from multiple experts on the subject highlight how dangerous this new frontier is… A few examples, Elon Musk and his warnings, a panel of 300+ scientist signing their names to a document considering Ai as dangerous as nuclear bombs and pandemics, congress putting rules and regulations, etc. Author Yuval H. estimates up to 80% of jobs will be eliminated by Ai.
And the real kicker is…. The people that are buying and creating this technology will be the easiest to replace…. Thought workers are right up Ai’s alley. Guess what, it learns faster than you, never gets hungry, never sleeps, never needs to go home to see its family, never is tempted by lust, it just learns and makes better decisions than any politician, doctor, lawyer, CEO, CFO, CPA, the list is endless on how much better educated this technology will be in just a short amount of time… Scary huh!
- The ease with which their advantages can be observed.
Still searching for this one… I hear all the advantages, cutting labor costs, generating content, learning your organization and pointing out inefficiencies, the list goes on and on… yet, I’m not sure how any of these actually makes me want to purchase a product or change my habits. Ultimately, I see this technology going the way of email. In the beginning it was revolutionary and so new that you took the time to stop, open and read each email. Now I have 3 burner email addresses just to combat the number of junk mails I will get from each organization I have ever given my data to (which is every possible organization now days) Simply way too much…. Overkill and it results in emails now getting almost no attention. Ai ads and art and music and everything will just water down the technology, ultimately costing its social value and prestige as well.
My prediction, you will find yourself, in the not-so-distant future saying to each other, “Man, you just can’t beat the authentic human sound. I miss real human authors. What ever happened to a good old human on the other end of the phone actually listening to you… I sure miss those days.”
