FAQ 8: Is Artificial Intelligence worth all the hype?

Lindsay Herbert, keynote speaker and author of the acclaimed book ‘Digital Transformation’ continues her series answering frequently asked questions on the subject of digital transformation.

Here Lindsay answers the question: “Is Artificial Intelligence worth all the hype?”

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Lindsay Herbert back with another Friday’s answered question. This Friday’s question is about artificial intelligence: is it worth all the hype?

Now, the people who ask me that question usually either think that artificial intelligence is fully developed and ready to just take on all human tasks, which is not true, (or) the other end of the misconception scale is that people think that because artificial intelligence is not yet capable of all the tasks a human can do that we shouldn’t bother with it, that it’s overblown, overhyped and let’s just sit back and wait for it to be developed to a greater extent.

Now to those people, I say: “what employment opportunities are you expecting to have in the future?”, because the people who are working with AI today (and I don’t mean computer scientists, I mean the people who are helping to do things like train a chatbot to answer questions on a customer service line), the people who are getting that experience and working hands-on with artificial intelligence today are the ones who are going to understand how their roles need to evolve to take advantage of the capabilities of AI.

Yes, they’re going to learn about the limitations of it that exist today, but they’re also going to help work through problems to make it better, stronger, more capable of complex decision making and most important empathy and understanding human need.

(To) the people that sit back and decide to wait: are you really going to let your future be decided by a small subset of tech billionaires, who you want to make all the calls and make all the decisions for you, in terms of how those future systems are going to think and understand and empathize, because that feels like not just a bad idea from a business and a competitive perspective, because you’re missing out on understanding what the technology today can do, but also from a future societal perspective.

How do you expect to play a role alongside AI and not just be flat-out replaced by it if you haven’t been actively involved in shaping its future, in shaping what has made it? Because there is no template for what an artificial intelligence does or how it’s going to think. We all have to contribute to that decision-making process now to prepare for that future, where it can think and it can reason.

So, is AI just hype? No, and if you think that and if you’re using that as your excuse for not getting involved, I hope you’ve got a really good retirement savings plan!

Thanks!

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