Your well-being, in the age of AI, depends on how well you adapt. In the near term, it’s not, as Richard Baldwin said at the World Economic Forum, that AI will take your job. It’s someone who knows how to use AI that will take your job. The same will be true in every other sphere. Those who are able to embrace AI will enjoy extraordinary opportunities to flourish. Those who cannot will be redundant, figuratively and perhaps literally.
The purpose of this column is to help you use this technology to thrive. It aims to show you how to harness AI to maximise your potential at work and at play. It will keep you abreast of how developments in AI affect your projects in Phuket. We’ll survey the latest research on topics like how to get AI into your workflow, how it can augment your children’s education and how it can be applied to Phuket’s problems and opportunities.
We won’t be unreflective cheerleaders for AI. The opportunities AI presents are enormous, but so are the risks. Job displacement and inequality are certain. Governments are using AI to build surveillance states. Militaries everywhere are developing autonomous weapons. On a personal level, research indicates that outsourcing thinking tasks to intelligent machines could undermine our own critical thinking and autonomy. These fears too will be explored in coming months.
You might think that AI doesn’t affect your Phuket life. Think again. AI decides what media you consume when you browse your device. Considering a new car or set of golf clubs? AI chose the ads you saw, putting the idea in your head. When you navigate Patong traffic or the Andaman Sea, you’re carrying out AI’s instructions. In ways subtle and profound, AI is already shaping the choices you make and the experiences you have.
This might sound like hyperbole. It has been two years since ChatGPT 3 was released. The most giddy predictions of that time have not been realised. Life now resembles life then. Generative AI has truly upended a few domains ‒ coding, writing, drug discovery and materials science. But these are quite specialised concerns. Is the arrival of AI really an inflection point?
Take a step back and we see that the hype is justified. In a study of the impact of AI at work, researchers at MIT found that Boston Consulting Group employees using ChatGPT were an astonishing 40% more productive than those that did not.
As the study’s co-author, Wharton Business School’s Ethan Mollick commented, that dwarfs the productivity gains achieved over decades in the Industrial Revolution. And this was with the now archaic ChatGPT 3 after minimal training a year after its release. The pace of change since then has been astronomical. When AIs learn to build AIs themselves, predicts futurist Ray Kurzweil, the science will advance faster than the human mind can follow.
A focus on productivity may even miss the profundity of what we are witnessing. As historian Yuval Harari says, AI possesses two traits that no other human creation has. First, it can make its own decisions. Second, as you’ll know if you’ve asked AI to write a story, it can synthesise ideas. The printing press could only help disseminate ideas that already existed. But when AI writes a story, says Harari, it is creating culture. If, as he argues, human lives are composed of stories, then it seems that our lives and our culture will increasingly be written by intelligent machines.
This column will help you co-author the stories AI will write for you. We’ll start next month with a review of how to instruct the latest, intuitive AI models for best results in your day-to-day tasks. Stay tuned for actionable insights on how you can use the power of AI to optimize your life in Phuket.
Joe Smith is Founder of the AI consultancy 2Sigma Consultants. He studied AI at Imperial College Business School and is researching AI’s effects on cognition at Lancaster University. He is author of ’The Optimized Marketer’, a book on how to use AI to promote your business and yourself. Email: joe@2Sigmaconsultants.com