In his own words…
Alex is a slightly rubbish entrepreneur who has had a few successes in digital, mobile, lawnmowers and stickers and has finally found his niche helping some of the worlds largest retailers and brands sift through the tsunami of martech shite out there to uncover the gems to help them become more successful. He was once imprisoned in Kazakhstan…
For those of a certain age who remember Dad’s Army this is the underlying fear, although throughout the ages this has always been so. The Bikini Atoll being a case in point.
It might be worth spending a moment thinking about some other events which were expected to hasten Armageddon…
Samuel Pierpont Langley, a 19th century American astronomer, physicist and aviation pioneer conducted extensive research on manned flight and believed that the forces involved in flight would pose insurmountable challenges for humans and would ultimately lead to their demise. More recently the “Y2K” bug was due to see the collapse of the global banking system and planes fall out of the sky.
With the news that AI chatbots could soon be more intelligent than humans, am I the only person who secretly thinks that given the quality of some of our leaders, that might not be a bad thing?
After all, the Darwin Awards were created for a (tongue in cheek) reason!
On a more serious note, AI is likely to have as profound an impact on our lives, as was the case with the Internet; there will be winners and losers.
We’re already seeing the growth in great uses (more accurate medical diagnoses, quicker developments of medicines, no need to learn to play chess) as well as the inevitable growth in hucksters and snake-oil merchants touting the next big thing in which investors can spunk their savings.
In the agency space, more losers than winners I suspect, although to quote James Clear from Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems”.
However, as a strong believer in the maxim, garbage in garbage out, I suspect that humans will remain relevant for some time, but as with any Industrial Revolution-style upheaval, many jobs could be created in areas we do not yet fully understand (“prompt engineers” anyone?)
My fundamental sadness (as I do not feel qualified to have a grown-up opinion on AI) is the loss of trust and innocence that is likely to occur as any content or output will need to be sifted through a filter of cynicism, before it can be fully trusted.
