I. Wrote. This.
I wrote this post. It feels weird prefacing it by saying that. Me, the human, the thing that passes CAPTCHA tests, actually physically tapped keys on a keyboard, intentionally, multiple times, to bring this before you. This post is inspired, in part, by one of the multitude of Instagram reels my Godmother sends me when she is bored on the train:
What’s scary about it, other than the weird moving mouth and having to fake it about drinking wine, is that older generations of people will be easily fooled into thinking it’s real. If we apply this to more serious topics, like antivax, we can see how a generation of people can be easily misled. The problem is further exacerbated by AI which enables this to be created at scale.
The growth and spread of AI raises questions around ethics as well as, often positive, possibilities about how it can be used in the workplace. I will admit that when looking for ideas on what to write about in relation to AI and Digital Transformation, I obviously I had to ask ChatGPT (now version 4!) what to write about
Yes, I’m still saying please.
Aspects around the future of work and ethics make sense, especially since Microsoft launched Office 365 Copilot with Google also recently announcing Generative AI additions to Workspace.
It’s hard not to feel insignificant in the face of these advancements. One gets the feeling that people are going to have whole careers, go to meetings, exchange emails, do reports and summaries, draft plans and code projects without ever having to know even what industry they're in or what the business they work for does. This mental detachment from work is equally exhilarating as it is debilitating. One thing it is not is boring.
This mainstreaming of deep technology does a few very noticeable things:
It scales the adoption by putting it into the hands of millions of users very quickly. This poses a massive challenge to managers, business owners and the procurers of white-collar labour: what do we do with people now? How does this affect things like the 4 day workweek which has generated angst from owners of production and cheers from labour? It is emerging that companies which adopt AI have as much as 50% increase in their productivity. At scale, this means that the majority of white collar work advances 50% more and quicker than it has previously.
It raises anxiety levels around privacy concerns: what happens when machines can see everything we’re doing? As these models rely on learning from previous data, could proprietary business strategy or information created using cloud platform tools input to suggestions made to other people?
It produces a human feedback loop which increases its efficacy as well as its advancement and as it advances, the chances of containing it diminish drastically:
It obviously produces distinctive upsides by making work more accessible. “Data is the new oil” can now be replaced by the gold that the story of data provides. LLMs can conceivably make spreadsheets obsolete so it makes sense for an entity like Microsoft to incorporate it into Excel in order to augment it first.
Some technology pundits have gone as far as to compare AI to the invention of the wheel with regards to transforming the world of work. I found this video from Schmidt Futures to be both illuminating as well as terrifying:
To many, the jury is still out on AI; possibly because they aren’t aware of when it has an influence on their lives. Like my Godmother, happily posting me deepfakes of wine-guzzling housewives, they are unaware of the extent to which technology has a hold on their lives, their thoughts and their actions.
What do you think about AI? Are you looking forward to your Excel sheet being brought into vivid technicolour? I’d love to know.
PS: Bonus content for the studious, a great thread on what this technology will do in relation to software distribution and end user programming:
