I’m on a roll this week and wanted to write about some of the more interesting things that are emerging in ‘AI’.
Le me start with
A simple beautiful example of a teacher using AI
A dedicated teacher used AI to create inspiring images of students' future selves, based on their dreams, igniting motivation and ambition.
I feel increasingly certain that the future will be much more interesting and creative than this even with simple AI innovations.
Talking of which remind me…
Recently there was this pic which went viral asking AI to do laundry and dishes
We already have washing machines and dishwashers (and spouses) as robots lol...what more you want seriously?
We are the brightest stars
I love technology because technology expands human potential. Ten thousand years ago, we could build some hand tools, change which plants grow on a small patch of land, and build basic houses. Today, we can build 800-meter-tall towers ( bhurj-Khalifa), store the entirety of recorded human knowledge in a device we can hold in our hands, communicate instantly across the globe, double our lifespan, and live happy and fulfilling lives without fear of our best friends regularly dropping dead of disease.
Are we going in right direction with AI?
Here I am going with Judea Pearl.
Pearl, now 87, is recognised as the godfather of AI, and a few years ago I read an interview with him in The Atlantic and remember finding the last part chilling but let me quote his views on current AI:
We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently.
Fun fact: Geoffrey Hinton, the #1 most cited AI scientist, said AIs are sentient, quitted Google, and started to work on AI safety. He joined the other two most cited AI scientists (Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever) in pivoting from AI capabilities to AI safety.
What about AI in marketing:
It looks like AI is better than humans at persuading other humans. Aside from being very scary—can we convince humans to keep AI bottled if AI is more convincing than us?—it’s also the basis for all sales and marketing to be automated.
What could that look like? Bland AI gives us a sense:
you can hear another such call here
I’ve met multiple AI startups who have early data that their product will replace $20-an-hour human workers with 2-cent-an-hour AI agents, that work 24/7/365.
GenAI is about to destroy the business of creative agencies.
Personally, I am less bothered about AI's role in marketing ( create unlimited content, do A/B testing, reduce the work to 1/100th but all that is too boring & simple for me now)
My first exposure to AI was 2016 while working as a CMO of a Singapore based fintech company - not when ChatGPT got hyped so I’ve pretty decent edge on AI compared to others and I keep honing my prompting skills.
You might find these articles with my AI prompts useful
& a long ass 2700+ word prompt to get the real customer avatar in below rticle
50% of web content is already AI-generated
Look at these amazing AI videos created in seconds
Mona Lisa in action
Note: These creations have been made with the generative AI tool Kling. Kling is an AI video generation tool developed by the Chinese company Beijing Kuyun Technology in collaboration with Tsinghua University. It allows you to create high-quality videos from simple text descriptions.
Are we going to lose our jobs to AI?
According to the Society of Authors, 26% of illustrators and 36% of translators have already lost work due to generative AI.
The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said artificial intelligence will result in “minimal” need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI’s rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond.
Here’s a good example of how AI will change real-life service—and also kill lots of jobs in the process:
Self driving building Janitor. Cleans all bathrooms in a multi-story building. Unassisted.
Fruit farmers' most difficult task is organising the harvest. Tevel's drones select, pick and box only ripe fruits with the help of an AI
I’ll write one long article or (maybe cover all this in detail with a lot more examples in my next paid newsletter BuckTheFad issue 3 - you can still grab issue 2 here ) but what I'm really excited about and reading on these days extensively is...
>> Use of AI in defence (you know most tech innovations happens there » Internet, RADAR, GPS, Drones, Night Vision, Jet engines ...one can go on so go read what how they are using AI )
For starters how about this remote security
>> Use of AI in healthcare (big big innovations coming up, we’ll likely find a cure for cancer faster than just individual human brains could manage)
High-skill jobs are also threatened. For example, surgeons.
Note that the textile industry employs tens of millions of people around the world, but couldn’t be automated in the past because it was too hard to keep clothing wrinkle-free.
With this type of skill, how long will it take to automate these jobs?
And what will it do to our income?
Maybe we should reinvent ourselves into a less replaceable worker?
>> Use of AI in mining (to solve material scarcity): The deepest mines are gold mines in South Africa 3-4 km deep, the Earth's crust is about 40-70 km. Mining can help in more electrification over combustion, make most of nuclear power and a LOT many benefits can be unlocked...)
and I don’t know how you go about things you wanna do but 'to ride a driverless car' is in my to-do list now with a date (circled)
Oh and I am pretty excited about some exciting future projects like …
Matt Webb’s Poem/1 is device that tells the time with a brand new poem every minute, composed by ChatGPT.
Also in this vein, this Poetry Camera. Instead of taking pictures this device converts what it sees into a unique poem that is printed off onto receipt paper.
When creating new content becomes virtually free, all kinds of ordinary products can be reimagined as endless streams of written or visual content.
Other thoughts:
This is a beautiful essay written by Vauhini Vara and an AI bot about the death of her sister.
I thought this essay by Jay Kaspian Kang about using AI to write his novel was interesting.
Final Thoughts
Focus on the AI revolution that benefits us all, not just the one that finds right matching socks (although, that would be pretty sweet too - and a simple solution to that is buy 10 same pair of socks and never bother about silly things like matching them)
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