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Is AI your warm and cuddly friend at work?

Thursday, March 07, 2024 — updated on August 22, 2024 - 4 min read

Robot working at an office. Automation is simply capital replacin human labour. Shutterstock

By David J. Abbott

Columnist

aCatalyst Consulting

Thank you for reading businessdailyafrica.com

“It’s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts,” said Earl Weaver. Harvard Business Review reports that 44 percent of business and financial operations occupations, 40 percent of management occupations, and 33 percent of sales occupations will be impacted by artificial intelligence [AI].

Still learning, let’s take the case of the 50-plus types of planning in business. Scenario, supply chain, financial, optimisation planning…it’s a long list. When you think you are searching using Google, perhaps it’s Google searching you. In the age of AI and what some have called ‘surveillance capitalism’, has the observer, become the observed? Are we on the brink of a brave new world, or risk facing eventual extinction, if AI gets out of control? Or, is AI just another technology that we soon adapt to, and not even barely notice?

AI is a game-changer across industries, a genuine paradigm shift, shifting our notion of planning, and just about everything else. In a recent interview with Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, Elon Musk, referred to AI as ‘smarter than any human’. Interestingly, if you ask ChatGPT if this is true, it gives a Manchurian candidate-like, diplomatically considered, balanced response.

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“AI and humans possess different types of intelligence, and it’s not accurate to make a blanket statement that one is inherently ‘ smarter’ than the other. Let’s break down the differences: AI excels at specific tasks and can outperform humans in areas such as data analysis, pattern recognition, and repetitive tasks. Humans have general intelligence, allowing them to adapt to a wide range of tasks, think critically, and exhibit creativity,” states the freely available AI tool.

From 1760 to 1840, the English Industrial Revolution replaced human labour with machines. Today, AI has the potential to transcend the limitations of the human mind, allowing it to analyse masses of data in the blink of an eye. In the nine decades, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, economic historians report that real wages went down thanks to automation. Automation is simply capital replacing human labour.

Cuddly friend or fatal threat?

Today, there are [at least] two schools of thought on automation through AI. One is pessimistic, that AI will make a whole category of repetitive, tedious jobs redundant, and that real wages and household incomes risk dropping, as has happened in communities in Michigan in the US, home of the once big three car makers, GM, Ford, and Chrysler—where legions of car workers have been largely replaced by AI-powered robots.

The second scenario, is a touch more optimistic, believing that the economy has always been characterised by jobs disappearing, being replaced by others, and requiring new knowledge and skills.

Here the belief is that AI is a ‘blip on the screen’ and employers and the labour market just have to evolve and adapt. History shows that when a technology becomes commonplace and is adopted by many, it is considered to be less valuable, and treated like a commodity.

When Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press in 1440, it opened up a world of learning and possibilities for the common person. Almost 600 years later, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, all voracious eclectic readers, still benefit from the work of the German inventor.

But unlike the invention of the printing press, electronic calculator, or Excel spreadsheet, AI is developing so fast that the concern is that it can soon ‘think for itself’. Something your smartphone can’t do.

Leading the charge, with concerns about the possible profound impact of AI is Sapiens author Yuval Hariri, who believes AI is an alien threat that could wipe us out: “Instead of coming from outer space, it’s coming from California,” says the thinker, who views history, as the study of change.

Billions of dollars are being poured into the development of AI, with the technology being hailed as a “revolution, but historians and philosophers see it as an “alien species” that could trigger humanity’s extinction.

Social media companies, with their [press the ‘Like’ icon] addictive free products, have become the giants that risk further dominating our world, with access to tremendous amounts of data about us. Their ability to provide an in-demand free service and then collect data that can monetised, and sold back to advertisers is a stroke of genius—perhaps not genius—but an interesting move. This ability to know more about us, than we know about ourselves, has been, for these tech giants, the source of the ultimate creation of wealth.

Lesson learned: We don’t know it all. It’s one thing to be able to analyse masses of data, but nothing can replace the warmth of a person’s smile.

The writer is a director at aCatalyst Consulting. [email protected]

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