In recent years, tech-celeration has changed the way humans interact in and beyond the workplace. While rapid tech adoption is considered good, it also fuels the emergence of new risks and “unknown unknowns” in an ever-changing macro landscape.
As we enter 2023 on the brink of economic strife, something must balance the scales and help business leaders tackle their biggest problems.
One answer lies in another tech breakthrough: Artificial intelligence is ready to perform at scale. Its full implementation cannot be predicted at this point, but it promises real-time actionable insights and offers newfound agility in an uncertain world.
AI has come a long way from its rudimentary applications of answering trivia and playing chess and is ready to solve—and occasionally create—complex problems for society and business amid all these newly emerging risks.
Early adopters will undoubtedly push the AI envelope into untested moral, ethical and legal waters, just as the Industrial Revolution did for labor, the internet did for communication and privacy and Web3 did for decentralization and ownership.
Innovation has unintended side effects, and too much of a good thing can still be bad. While moral, ethical and legal questions are important for society to answer, it’s important to ponder with context—and remember that history rhymes.
The steam engine was expected to lead to mass layoffs. Sound familiar? Instead, it increased the number of U.S. manufacturing jobs, driving wage increases and creating the middle class.
The transition to wood pulp paper was blamed for suicides and crime sprees and decried as a degradation of society. Sound familiar?
In calmer retrospection, we can thank wood-pulp paper for global literacy rates that have risen from 40% in 1960 to nearly 90% today.
Let’s not forget that an 1878 editorial from the New York Times suggested that Thomas Edison had invented too much and should be hanged for his early microphone prototype: “Something ought to be done to Mr. Edison, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope. … Business, marriage, and all social amusements will be thrown aside, except by totally deaf men, and America will retrograde to the Stone Age with frightful rapidity.”
History is littered with bad technology predictions, but early adopters of AI should engage contrarians with an open mind. Laggards often seek to protect consumers and workers, and AI has immense potential to improve the lives of these two groups.
For example, the FDA approved Cionic robotic clothing, which learns—and corrects for—the involuntary movements of neurological conditions like cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and strokes.
By learning the signals from the brain and misfires in the muscles, Cionic gives its wearers natural, smooth motions. Unlike bulky exoskeleton technology, this low-profile clothing learns what the brain wants and corrects the body, instead of restraining it.
This technology could vastly improve the lives of more than 39 million Americans with motor impairment, and 720 million people worldwide.
ChatGPT was rolled out to the public in late 2022, pushing the envelope of conversational AI.
