AI - Time to Stop Drinking the Cool Aid?

Not a day goes by without a new AI headline. Every time you visit LinkedIn or attend a conference you are bombarded with the wonderful things that people are doing with AI. Some of these are grounded in reality where others are perhaps overhyped. One thing is certain in that ever since Gen AI hit the headlines, month by month, AI has become more capable, and this will continue.

It is important that we stop being insular. People are very much focusing on individual use cases and how AI can help them in relation to their “as is” tasks i.e., their thinking is very much around improving the now rather than reimagining how they work or how their organisations can work in the future. When they think through implementation people often focus on time savings or headcount reductions rather than how they optimise their operating model.

It is also important that we think through the implications of what is happening with a view to speculating what the future will look like.

Taking one scenario, many people have talked to me about how they use AI to deal with their emails quicker. Whilst on the one hand this is great, on the other in a world where over 365 billion emails are sent per day (which is already an increase of 4% to 5%), is this really going to improve the world, or will it give rise to more work overload?

Taking this analysis further, Richard Suskind OBE, has pointed out how AI can write in the style of a person and has used it to generate an article as if he had written it. Copilot AI can also understand your knowledge and context. Even without microchipping people’s brains (as Elon Musk has predicted), we know it is possible to inject a bank of knowledge into a corpus of a large language model and in the same way if you need a new skill set this could be injected into your “email inbox” corpus. We also know it is possible to create deep fake video and audio of people. Again, thinking this through, what does this mean in terms of people’s vacations? Does this for example mean that you could go on holiday and get to a point where nobody knows? i.e., your emails are dealt with automatically by an avatar which looks exactly like you and knows how you think? If you need to recruit new team members instead of conducting this recruitment, could you simply replicate yourself and/or combine that with other experienced team members? Where does this leave you ultimately, in that do you become dispensable?

The large legal publishers are quite rightly very keen to ensure their content is not consumed by large language models as they have spent years and millions curating this but on the other hand, our personal content is much less protected. Does this mean we are constantly feeding models which will eventually replace us?

I listened to the chairperson of a large law firm the other day talking about how he had visited a law firm office in Asia and had been greeted by a robot. He reported the experience was positive and had had an incredibly good and welcoming conversation only to then be told by the managing partner that they would have a robot in all of their clients’ offices in the next two years. This gives the phrase “robot lawyer” a completely new meaning. If you combine this with the points made above, it leads to a somewhat challenging view of the future.

And so, what am I saying? I think the key points are threefold:

1.      We need to stop thinking on a micro basis and think in a much more macro basis. We need to think through the long-term implications of what is happening here and the effects on society and the economy.

2.      Secondly, we are meant to be the most intelligent creatures on the planet. We need to think through what our ultimate destiny looks like. What does the future look like, and do we like the look of it? Is there a better future and how do we get to it? We may be facing a key moment in the future of humanity, and it is important we take the right decisions.

3.      What do we see as the role of our firms or departments in the future? What could and should they look like? How do we support our businesses and people in this new world.

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