AI will change everything
In truth, it already has
By Saul Garlick
Some of it will seep in
Some of it will be a shock
We will think AI works for us
We will think we work for AI
We will feel more taken care of
We will feel more vulnerable
We will get dumber
We will solve more problems more quickly
We will build faster
We will lose our creativity
There future of our relationship with information and each other is already being completely altered. AI is changing everything.
These are the thoughts that go through my head almost daily when I process the consequences of AI for our society.
When I put on the Unleesh lens, my primary concern is how we can leverage AI to help bring ideas to life. In many ways we are entering the golden age of bringing ideas to life. Natural Language Prompts alone can build real, usable solutions.
Take that in for a second.
I can write a wish and make it so.
What this means for business and society, I believe, is a sea change in how we live as significant as the Renaissance. Not the Industrial Revolution, which was a technological leap and a reordering of work. Not the Internet boom, which was another technological leap that redefined communication and unlocked a new set of business models.
This one is going to be as big as the Renaissance, which redefined how we think. How we think about ideas, science, religion and government.
When you’re in it, you don’t feel the change. Where we are today reminds me of the joke popularized by David Foster Wallace in a 2005 commencement speech:
Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says:
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes:
“What the hell is water?”
Here’s the thing. I implore you to feel the water and think about its impact on your business. As one friend in finance said to me the other day, “What’s the relevance of all this in my industry?”
My eyes nearly popped out of my head. AI will almost certainly completely alter his industry. I replied, thinking on the spot of one use case: “you can drop in all the research reports you’d read on a company and outline your investment thesis and instantly it will tell you if the investment fits the thesis based on ALL the data in the reports, and whatever else you feed it.”
He couldn't believe it.
This is just one small example of how technology will upend our operating model, our approach to work, our need for work at all.
But if your business is not already on top of the AI wave, or seriously exploring what you need to be doing with AI in the next 3 years, you may be left completely behind.
People who know me don’t usually call me hyperbolic. Here, I think I might be underselling the scale of change that is upon us.