Imagine you are a business owner. And have engaged the services of a superb employee who barely commits errors in eventual anything. Your business records reduction in human error to its best, a departure from the situation – where other employers make errors from time to time on eventually anything irrespective of the training and development lessons offered. Let’s call our error –free employee Empress. How about when Empress works with high accuracy, is available at work each day of the week and throughout all day – 24 hours for 7 days. Empress’ employment also supports training and operation cost reduction, improvement in processes, and help in managing repetitive, dangerous and unpleasant jobs others will complain about. Empress can as well offer digital assistance and speeds up decision-making in all things. Empress is barely seen sleeping at post, nor requesting time off for funerals, weddings, parties and other family, personal, community and or religious activities. Empress is always punctual each day, every day and never late for work. All your stakeholders frequently applaud Empress for making things a lot easier and a lot less time-consuming. What a blessing of an employee! Many will soliloquy.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University also have been looking into the productivity of workers using generative AI to help them with their work. The study, which assessed the performance of more than 5,000 customer support agents, showed workers were on average 14% more productive when using generative AI tools.
However, Empress is also denoted to poses great ethical, social and legal challenges and threats to your business environment – as some stakeholders also claim that, the employment of Empress will wipe out jobs for all its other branches as Empress is eventual seen multi-tasking, and managing boring repetitive tasks excellently well like data entry.
Considering the demerits of engaging Empress; research has found out that, Empress’ engagement either with the private sector or public sector though will help potentially automate tasks and jobs. This could lead to job losses and workforce displacement. While this can bring cost savings for businesses – a situation every business will love as profit is the bottom line, it can also lead to social and economic disruption, particularly in areas where large proportion of the workforce is at risk of being replaced by just Empress. What then happens to assuming 80% reduction in staff strength from our other branches? It’s great, but what will those displaced employees be doing? And how will they be keeping on?
Still on demerits and threats, other stakeholders of the business and researchers are also of the opinion that when we engage the services of Empress our business will face these top 5 risks at minimum, thereby calling those business leaders to watch out for risk of disruption.
Empress in this context refers to Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI will disrupt existing business models and markets like no technology before it. AI will again introduce cyber security, reputational, legal and operational risk at minimum. So I ask, why not prepare for the future of work and the challenges it presents? As a business owner, per chance is it not too early and too quick to predict to knowing and understanding Empress- your AI too well?
According to media updates on the subject matter, we asked ChatGPT and two other leading AI bots how they would replace humanity. The answers may shock you. At least one artificial intelligence technology believes it can take over the world and enslave the human race. When asked about the future of AI, Google’s Bard – bard which is a conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google, based initially on the LaMDA family of large language models and later the PaLM LLM said it had plans for world domination starting in 2023. You heard it right. But, two of its competitors, chatGPT and Bing were both trained to avoid the tough conversation. Whether the AI chatbots will take over the world — or our jobs — is still up for debate. What do you also make of it?
Some believe AI will become so knowledgeable that they will no longer need humans. This situation in turn will render humans obsolete. Others also think it’s a fad, and that this trend will die out. Should we consider the demand and supply rule; we can infer then that – more interest in something will almost always equal more speculation and analysis. Therefore, the consumer interest around it has never been greater. This will grow. Do you also think, the future of humanity depends on the choices we all make today including data we feed AI.
The debate continues that; ‘AI is an existential threat to humanity’: Now doctors and public health experts across four continents issue fresh call for artificial intelligence to be halted – warning it could be used to make weapons of mass destruction. We are unsure for now if AI’s benefits unweigh its risk or vice versal. Team of five doctors and global health policy experts from across four continents said there were three ways in which the tech could wipe out humans.
First is the risk that AI will help magnify controlling tactics like investigation and disinformation. The ability of AI to rapidly clean, organize and analyze massive data sets consisting of personal data, including images collected by the increasingly ever-present presence of cameras, they say, could make it easier for authoritarian or totalitarian regimes to come to power and stay in power. Can you imagine either political party coming to power then, starting on like forever? What will become of our state?
Second, the group warns that AI can accelerate mass murder through the prolonged use of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). And, lastly, the health experts expressed worry over the potential for severe economic devastation and human misery, as untold millions lose their livelihoods to those hard-working bots. Projections of the speed and scale of job losses due to AI-driven automation, according to the authors, range from tens to hundreds of millions over the coming decade. And don’t forget that, these observations comes only weeks after over a thousand scientists, including John Hopfield from Princeton and Rachel Branson from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, signed a letter calling for a halt to AI research over similar concerns.
The British Medical Association journal joins in and also shared on the countless possibilities for abuse of today’s level of AI technology. The Journal describes its threats to ‘democracy, liberty and privacy,’ which got the authors to label how governments and other large institutions might program the complex tasks of mass surveillance and online digital disinformation programs to AI. The authors wrote, ‘AI-driven information systems may further undermine democracy by causing a general breakdown in trust or by driving social division and conflict, with ensuing public health impacts.’
Describing threats posed to ‘peace and public safety,’ the authors detailed the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), killing machines like the T-800 endoskeleton which we often see in films like Terminator. LAWS, these experts say, would be capable of locating, selecting, and engaging human targets all on their own.
‘Such weapons,’ they write, ‘could be cheaply mass-produced and relatively easily set up to kill at an industrial scale. Can you imagine a scenario where, possibly a million tiny drones equipped with explosives, visual recognition capacity and autonomous navigational ability can be contained within a regular shipping container and programmed to kill.
The researchers’ last broad threat category, ‘threats to work and livelihoods,’ drew attention to the likelihood of impoverishment and misery as ‘tens to hundreds of millions’ lose their jobs to the ‘widespread deployment of AI technology.’ ‘While there would be many benefits from ending work that is repetitive, dangerous and unpleasant,’ these medical professionals wrote, ‘we already know that unemployment is strongly associated with adverse health outcomes and behaviour’.
Perhaps most alarming, nearly one-in-five professional AI experts appear to agree with them.
The authors cited a survey of members of the AI society in which 18% of participants stated that they believed development of advanced AGI would be existentially catastrophic for humanity. “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) refers to a theoretical type of artificial intelligence that possesses human-like cognitive abilities, such as the ability to learn, reason, solve problems, and communicate in natural language.”
Half of the members of the AI society surveyed predicted that AGI would likely start knocking on our door sometime between 2040 and 2065. What will you plan to do? Researchers in Silicon Valley signed a letter issuing similar warnings last month. Their ranks included DeepAI founder Kevin Baragona, who told DailyMail.com: ‘It’s almost akin to a war between chimpanzees and humans. The humans obviously win since we’re far smarter and can leverage more advanced technology to defeat them. ‘If we’re like the chimpanzees, then the AI will destroy us, or we’ll become enslaved to it. More than 1,000 tech leaders including Elon Musk, researchers and others signed an open letter now, urging a suspension on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a computer program, is seen as a program which mimics human behavior by learning various data patterns and insights. As a field of study, artificial intelligence combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving. AI enables automation of repetitive boring tasks in areas such as data collection, data entry, customer focused business, email responses, software testing, invoice generation, and many more. Employees get time to focus on such tasks which require human abilities.
Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana are one of the main examples of AI in everyday life. These digital assistants help users perform various tasks, from checking their schedules and searching for something on the web, to sending commands to another app. AI can filter email spam, categorize and classify documents based on tags or keywords, launch or defend against missile attacks, and assist in complex medical procedures. Reason you need to know how to prepare for the future of work, understand the essence of tags and keywords usage especially in applying for jobs. You risk not being selected if you miss out on these guidelines. Same applies to every other basic everyday tasks we may be accustom to. Let’s unlearn and re-learn the relevant skills and be job ready for the 21st century and beyond.
“Russian president Vladimir Putin joined the war of words concerning the international race to develop artificial intelligence. Speaking to students recently, Putin predicted that whichever country leads the way in AI research will come to dominate global affairs. Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind,” said Putin, “It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world”. The Russian leader predicted that future wars will be fought by drones, and “when one party’s drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender as reported by CNBC news and RT.
When work, workforce and the workplaces change; the rise of technology like Artificial Intelligence should prompt your preparation for the future as AI is a technology that is transforming every walk of life.
