We are told that AI will change the way we work and it will increase productivity in all that we do. Ethan Mollick mentions the idea of ‘augmentation’ in his book Co-Intelligence. By augmentation he means that AI should be seen as a way to enhance the things that we do on a regular basis freeing up time to work on things that bring greater value to our lives. He takes an optimistic view on the future of AI suggesting that there will need to be a “human at the table” when interacting with artificial intelligence. It becomes a co-worker, a colleague and when it doubt, invite your AI tool of choice to the table. It is also a great way to get started with AI. If you have a birthday party to plan for a friend and you’re looking for some creative ideas, invite AI to the table and ask it to generate some suggestions. I have had the best results when I prompt AI to “act as” a party planner, to continue with this example.

Elaborating on the idea that AI will increase productivity, we will see AI touch on every aspect of our lives. Some of these areas will be more obvious and others less. We are already interacting with AI on a daily basis, every time you open up a social media app or you’re presented with a targeted google ad. AI is a General Purpose Technology (GPT coincidently) in that it will touch on many dissimilar areas of life. Mollick talks about how steam power kicked off the industrial revolution by impacting the manufacturing process and the creation of the factory. And this happened slowly over time, much like the adoption of the personal computer. AI has changed all of this. It is the fastest growing technology in the history of man and it will change everything. We can still choose how we would like to interact with this technology and set our own guard rails and limits but one thing is for sure, that there is no escaping what is coming. Everything from medicine, to education, to transportation to energy consumption will be touched by this technology. More has happened in the past 3 years with AI than with any other technology in history.

Early studies of the effects of AI have found it can often lead to a 20 to 80 percent improvement in productivity across a wide variety of job types, from coding to marketing. By contrast, when steam power, that most fundamental of General Purpose Technologies, the one that created the Industrial Revolution, was put into a factory, it improved productivity by 18 to 22 percent. And despite decades of looking, economists have had difficulty showing a real long-term productivity impact of computers and the internet over the past twenty years.

I came across the book Co-Intelligence from Ethan Mollicks’ master class on AI. It is a great introduction to the technology and I learnt alot about some of the tools out there to help create logo’s (the logo of my website was created by AI) to how to frame prompts to get the best results.

I use these tools in my everyday life. I use ChatGPT tasks to give me market insights for the day. I use copilot to summarize PDF documents and give me key takeaways. I use AI to give me a template for memo’s to communicate to my staff. The possibilities are really endless.

There are and will continue to be some significant ethical considerations to keep in mind when using AI. AI has learnt from the databases of human knowledge and with it comes our biases and prejudices. If we asked an AI agent to lean from the hiring practices of all Engineering jobs over the past 25 years, it will determine that the highest paid and most eligible applicants are male. From there AI can deduce that future male applicants will be the best candidates for engineering roles and can reject female applicants moving forward. Intuitively we know this to not be true but if the AI is learning purely from historical references and data, this is what will be determined. We need to be mindful when creating AI tools to keep a level of openness and awareness that just because data shows one result it does not mean that it is fact.

There is so much more to discuss and I will be posting more thoughts on the future of AI and how I use this tool in my day to day activities as well as my thoughts on how to introduce the technology to children. How do we best prepare for the world of tomorrow?