In January, Authentik published our first-ever White Paper all about AI. It can help leaders understand the implications of this latest technological revolution. This Sunday Story is a 6-month check-in on how far AI has come since January. We’ve already talked about how fast this change is happening in our Disruption Series, and so far the pace has been accurate. This Sunday Story is a roundup of real-world practical applications of AI so that you can continue to prepare for this technological disruption.
Before we begin it would be helpful to revisit why the AI revolution is going to be so impactful. It’s not the first time our society has changed because of technology; the discovery of agriculture (which likely happened at multiple times in ancient history) can be traced back thousands of years and it fundamentally shifted humanity from hunter-gatherers to being able to live in cities. There were a few other technological leaps forward - the printing press in 1440 took the laborious task of writing books and made it efficient and cheap(er) to access knowledge. There’s a direct line from that invention to the rebirth of scientific inquiry through the Renaissance and that led to the next technological revolution - the Industrial Revolution. Where Agriculture replaced the energy required for nomadic behaviour and hunter gathering, the Industrial Revolution essentially replaced the human labour required for making things: instead of one person toiling away to make a chair, the chair was made far faster and more efficiently in the chair factory.
The Industrial Revolution also spawned the railroad, which led to the telegrams which led to the telephone, which eventually led to the internet. Computing in general was a huge technological revolution too, and so we’ve weathered these disruptions before. So what’s different about AI?
Previous disruptions were all about changing the way humans value manual labour - hand painting books one by one was replaced by the printing press, the ability to raise and run a plow with oxen was replaced by tractors, and letter carriers were replaced by…dancing on TikTok, I suppose, as a form of conveying communication. All of these disruptions impacted manual labour, and many of them actually created totally new types of cognitive labour jobs like coders and engineers.
The AI revolution is different - the AI revolution is threatening to replace cognitive labour, not manual labour, and that is a significant change in what we’re used to. This binary is not meant to communicate a value statement - folks I know who work with their hands in manual labour jobs are some of the most intelligent people I’ve worked with, and their jobs definitely require a great deal of cognitive work alongside their skill with their tools.
But the fact is that humans are used to prior revolutions typically replaced manual labour and instead created more opportunities for cognitive labour - these are the folks whose contribution to society isn’t based on their ability to build something three dimensional with their hands, but on their ability to create something with their minds. Other ways of making this distinction are things like “Blue collar” vs “White collar” - AI is coming for both, but it’s the white collar folks who aren’t used to automation replacing their jobs, and they are going to have to be really soon. In this technological revolution it’s the accountants, analysts, doctors, copywriters, artists, managers, and other types of roles that AI is threatening to replace and not people who are paid for their ability to build and create physical objects. If you’re in a manual labour focused job and are feeling safe and smug or even just left out, don’t worry - because once AI has come for the cognitive labour jobs it’ll come for yours too via robotics.
That’s disruption, folks, and it’s here right now. Let’s look at some real examples that paint the picture in down to earth, practical ways.
1) ChatGPT has performed better than 100% of psychologists on a test of social intelligence. Social intelligence is the ability to “understand the feelings, emotions, and needs of people during a counselling process”. That’s not a typo in this bullet, by the way - ChatGPT 4.0 outperformed one hundred percent of all psychologists tested. You can try this out for yourself - go to “Try ChatGPT” and tell it you’re having a bad day and need some help, and see how it does. For some people with fear or anxiety around being vulnerable to a human, it’s actually a preferable alternative to a real live psychologist.
2) AI is probably better than your financial advisor is at predicting the performance of companies you might want to invest in. This isn’t that much of a feat given monkeys throwing darts have outperformed the market before - in fact, monkeys have outperformed professionals a few times - but here’s the thing: Go try to find a monkey, raise it, and teach it to throw darts. I’m not sure they have them at PetSmart so it might require some creativity on your part. I’ll wait while you do that, and in the meantime I’ll just open my smartphone and have ChatGPT analyze a financial statement. I might even hold a coffee in my free hand. Why haven’t you left yet to get your monkey? Best to stop at Costco, you’ll also need to stock up on diapers for your new lifelong simian commitment.
I have a hunch that my way will be faster and easier, and that's the big news here. This has knock-on effects for the entire banking industry; if you thought replacing tellers with ATMs was a threat to jobs in this industry, AI is (and will continue to) replace actuaries, analysts, accountants, and more.
3) Music - from writing to performing to selling - is being dramatically changed by Artificial Intelligence. We’ve previously written about OpenAI’s Sora and how incredible that already is even today, but it’s not really ready for prime time yet. However, folks have been making AI albums, and the ability to tell what is AI or actual human talent with our ears is already a challenge.
4) OpenAI has released a version of ChatGPT specifically for Colleges and Universities. There are already case studies of AI reducing weeks of research to seconds, and it is being used in the classroom to support learners gaining deeper reflection on their final assignments at Wharton business school. AI can do course outlines and serve as a personalized tutor, and it’s infinitely patient, which makes it more accessible for many students than the human equivalents of these things. If you work in education and aren’t currently using artificial intelligence to understand just how capable it is, you’re in for a shock.
5) Tradespeople, remember how I said you wouldn’t be left out? This bullet is for you. I want you to imagine standing on a large deflating ball (like a Yoga ball), and keeping your balance the whole way down. That’d be pretty tricky right? It requires a lot of fine motor control of your muscles and joints to react to the dynamic deflation of the ball to maintain balance. How would you learn how to do this? Probably by inflating a big ball, standing on it, and trying to balance. If you are naturally athletic you might get it in the first few tries, but it’s going to take time - you have to wait for the ball to deflate, then inflate it, then hop back on and repeat. And if you are not naturally athletic you might need to do this hundreds of times to get good at it.
But AI can learn how to do it in a virtual environment really fast. Because the environment is virtual, it can simply “speed up time” - so unlike us meat sacks in the 3D world, the virtual world the AI was training can go as fast as the processor would allow. Big deal, right? A virtual world isn’t the real world, so why worry about manual jobs being replaced?
Because when the AI was done training super fast they were able to load it into a real life robot and it successfully balance on a deflating ball on it’s first attempt. The first three minutes of the above-linked video demonstrates it fairly well. Remember, the AI training in its virtual environment can just “speed up” time in the virtual world and finish hundreds of attempts before you even get the ice pack from the freezer after falling off on your first attempt (maybe that’d be just me). And now we’ve seen evidence that this translates into a real 3D world - this is huge. Replace “Balancing on a ball” with fixing a pipe, or replacing a wall switch, or operating on someone’s brain, or any other type of work that was traditionally done by a physical human being.
Hopefully the above examples show you how practical applications of AI are already changing our world. This stuff isn’t just a really good chatbot or a “stochastic parrot”. They are fundamentally changing how we do cognitive labour, and speeding it up dramatically, which means we’re seeing leaps forward in how we take advantage of robots for manual labour. The artist in the music video above - Jonny Keely - makes an excellent point that trust and honesty are going to be fundamental to knowing what’s going on with our future, and we agree - which is why we’ve got an AI policy on our website - but the overall point is this: 6 months ago we predicted that AI would dramatically shift our economy, and we said then and again in our disruption series that it was going to happen fast. That’s exactly what’s happening right now, and this is disruptive.
Remember, the only difference between disruption and transformation is how intentional the process is, and now is the time to start getting intentional about this change.
Good thing you follow Authentik Consulting and Training. We’ve got the resources, briefing notes, and information you need to lead on purpose by focussing on our shared humanity. This will help your community - work, school, or other - thrive during disruption. We genuinely believe this technology will have a net positive effect on our species, and we’re counting on leaders like you to help us get there.
Thanks for reading, and we'll see you next Sunday.
P.S. If you want to start integrating AI into your work context right now, check out Procedure Pilot, Authentik’s first AI tool - it’s basically a personalized procedure expert, trained on your organizations information, available at a moment’s notice by sending an instant message via Discord, Slack, Teams, or other popular collaboration tools.
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