Jon Leighton, MD at Land Digital, shares his thoughts on the digital innovation that’s making moves in the digital world.
Over the last year, the hype around artificial intelligence (AI) has started to gain momentum – and I mean serious momentum. ChatGPT, for example, reached 1 million users in five days and surpassed 100 million in just two months.
But, along with skyrocketing adoption, we’ve also seen an increase in articles that outline the inevitable human demise it will bring, terminator-style.
Yet, while I’m no John Connor, I can confidently assure you that we won’t be battling the T-2000s for global domination anytime soon. But, will the rapid adoption and evolution of AI change the everyday way of life and the roles of professionals in certain industries?
The short answer is: well, it depends. I never claimed to be an AI expert, but what I can offer is my opinion and perspective as someone who has worked in digital for a while.
AI is a very broad topic that can mean different things to different people. It might mean large language models, machine learning, superintelligence, or self-awareness. And it has actually been around in its various costumes for quite some time. In fact, the earliest successful AI program was written in 1951. That’s right – AI in some form predates your grandparents twisting to Buddy Holly.
But, over the past year, it’s large language models, or LLMs, that have been making all the headlines in the world of AI. LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard, Claude and more have started to take prominence in all our feeds and inboxes, marking perhaps the most significant new wave of AI in the mainstream since the emergence of smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, which now already look very dated in their interactions.
So, how will all of these technologies change our everyday life and the way we work? Who knows – I did say I wasn’t an expert. But, I am confident there will be change, just as there was throughout the industrial revolution – and a lot of us remember the change the internet brought with it and the impact this has had on our daily lives.
Our working lives are already going through a period of change. There has been a greater adoption of technology over the past few years, which has evolved the way we interact and manage our professional workload, but I feel the bigger changes are yet to be seen. Industries that dedicate huge amounts of time to carrying out repeatable tasks or consume and summarise large amounts of content will need to look at their business model to identify future risks and assess how their models can adapt to change.
What else? Well, what about the four-day working week? This might actually be able to be introduced while increasing productivity, rather than settling for the same level of output. Hey, why even stop at the four-day week? Why not three, or even two days? You get the idea.
Will all of this be positive? I remember when I moved up to the North East 20 years ago and my parents gave me an A – Z roadmap, which is how I learned to navigate around the big roads (don’t judge me, we only had one roundabout where I grew up). At the time, I retained a lot of that information, but since the mass adoption of navigation I have relied more and more on just following the arrow. I know I’m not alone in saying that following this arrow has got me in a lot of trouble in the past.
Now, I think it would be fantastic if we enable AI to do all the ‘boring’ jobs and leave us to focus on being creative. That’s a far better outcome than letting AI do our thinking for us, which I feel would be a real shame and a great loss that we might not notice until it is too late.
But, to me, all of this doesn’t signal that the robot uprising is right around the corner, but rather, marks the beginning of a new era where we will rely more and more on the advancement of AI to power our daily lives. The intention of AI isn’t to help produce the same results for less, but instead to empower us all to do more, whether that’s in our professional or personal lives.
In other words, think of LLMs more like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 than the original. But, that’s not to say they can’t still pack a real punch – you still wouldn’t mess with Terminator 2 Arnold. While current LLMs may not understand the words they generate in relation to the prompts provided, this doesn’t not mean that these words can’t impact us and our lives. After all, humans don’t need to understand what they say for the words to have a positive or negative meaning to someone else.
So, as we race to embrace the latest AI innovations, it’s vital we remain conscious and responsible for the ways we use and interact with it day after day and reflect on lessons learnt from social media and the unexpected outcomes that medium has created.
