As one who treats exploring new technology in the same way as walking on thin ice in the middle of a lake, I trepidatiously took a few steps to find out about Artificial Intelligence and its effects on everyday life. This sudden curiosity was spurred by a meeting on the subject within our community. A few of us get together every now and then and listen to guests on subjects that range from A to Z. Most of the entertainment comes from the question-and-answer sessions!  They do wonders to keep mental acuity as honed as possible too. So, we had a local business development guru talk to us about AI and I have to say that having approached the meeting with a great deal of skepticism, I was enormously surprised to find that I could be easily fascinated by it. 

Thus far, ordinary folk like me have been exposed to the potential downsides of AI; altering stories or pictures to taint the reputations of otherwise upstanding members of society. Concerns over bending the truth, privately or publicly or even politically have already created an enormous amount of caution and confusion over any benefits it may bring. Our presenter pointed out that if the future of AI were to be expressed as a twenty-four-hour clock, then we would be sitting within the first few seconds of its capable future. It’s going to be HUGE, game-changing, life altering, even to the extent of changing the structure of how society lives. While most people want to protect their lifestyles and clutch them like hugging Teddy Bears, we don’t want to contemplate a future that we can’t yet fathom. It’s gonna be scary out there!

In our discussions, we took that protective stance and postured that AI would take away jobs. It will – big time and eventually millions of jobs will go away, or change and morph into something more efficient, productive and expand the current capacities of human endeavor to never-before-contemplated scales. Think of how the Industrial Revolution took manual labor jobs away from farmyards and parlors, the high street and the smithy. Things that were made or done locally, one at a time, now being produced all day, every day and everywhere at less cost to the access of everyone.

When I was in sales at a dealership in North London, part of my management training program was to develop a customer follow-up system – no computers in 1968 – Rolodex Files and 2” by 3” cards were the ‘brain’. The newest customer predictive systems will be able to tell you when Mr. Farnsbarns is next going to use the toilet, never mind buy a car. Amazon knows when you get up in the morning and will tell you it’s time to order more meds. They can tell more about you than you know yourself from billions and billions of data points.

Google’s at it. God knows what Elon Musk is capable of!

Our presenter offered a proposition – let’s design a marketing plan to open a new company; so, he asked us, the audience of know-nothings, to suggest the goofiest, most unlikely company to start. My neighbor, tongue in cheek, suggested a new gymnasium for shrimps (not the wimpy men kind, the sea-dwelling kind). So, we developed a plan, expenditures, staffing roster, advertising themes and placements, a character as advertising figurehead and a logo. A profit and loss summary was next. But get this; it did all of this in three and a half minutes!!!

Budgeting for a dealership was a month-long drag, especially when all the help you got was from a slide rule (most of our readers won’t know what that is) to figure out percentages for performance comparisons and so on.

AI would probably achieve the same in ten minutes. Just sayin’!