Congratulations! We Killed Ourselves!

While this is not a dystopian post, it may seem like one so apologies in advance for that! I am no expert on what I write about, these are just my observations on what has been going on and what could happen next.

Remember those days when phones became smart or semi smart and when cameras were added to phones about 25 years back? This was so novel, we did not need bulky cameras or film anymore, we could just click away on our phones and as the cameras were ever so handy and always in our hands, we started clicking and recording every inconsequential moment in our lives, if some of you have taken photographs on film, then you would remember that they were taken on mostly special occasions, the frame and shot was decided and then the shutter would be clicked. Then came the storage problem, where would all these digital photos be stored? Perhaps on an external hard drive, but who would see that? Or a cloud – remember Flickr and other such platforms? That way, we along with others could browse through the many moments of our lives right on screen! Then came the social media waves where perfect personal lives and associated photographs were rampantly shared and advertised. There were tools to capture the posts that were likeable and not likeable, what is happy or sad, hashtags to identify exactly what we were eating, where we travelled and what we did, and our reward was validation from our social circles.

Then came the front facing cameras and voice assistants on mobile phones, in my opinion they are the most irritating features ever invented! How many times has someone’s selfie stick hit you? The phone became our mirror and answered our questions, how cool is that! Everyone then scrambled to get a phone with a front facing camera and now photographs shared on social media had less background and more faces, we could also specify who were with, what we were doing and what was our location. Hmmm…..

 Okay lets back up again a bit, the millennials and Gen Z will probably not know of this phase perhaps, but blogging as a hobby was intensely popular about 25 to 30 years back, it still is but now most people do not have the ability to read due to attention deficit disorders, so platforms were invented where one could share one’s, vast wisdom in limited words. Anyway, getting back to blogs, it gave people a platform to write and express views which would have never found readership in publications, it was truly liberating and democratic for writers and non-writers to be read and followed by likeminded writers and readers all over the world. A lot of great content was created during this time and some of them have become established modern day online publications.

Most newspapers and magazines went online during this time too, thus increasing their reach. Books were available digitally and in audio book formats. Also, many universities across the globe started offering courses and content freely leading to a democratization of knowledge, through these platforms one could digitally access and learn courses from globally acclaimed universities.

Somewhere during this came the age of visual content, and what a game changer that has been! There is a video on everything that one can think of, any hobby, craft, recipe, reviews of movies, OTT content, books, Chinese medicine, yoga, spirituality, the list goes on. One can never run out of things to watch! It started with 10 minutes, then longer and then shorter and now super short in a minute or less, people can convey what they want in all these video formats.

Gradually there was an amalgamation of all these platforms and large companies now control most of the popular social media and other engagement platforms, more and more investment went to map user preferences and target advertisements and posts based on what a person liked as per past behaviour, doom scrolling, FOMO and dopamine spikes overtook our lives and suddenly there is so little time for things that really matter!

So, what was the point of all this one may ask? Well now that we are here at this point of time it is quite obvious:

• ·       The photographs we posted on cloud platforms and social media became fodder for facial recognition algorithms, and  input to the image generation models, thanks to us, now AI can generate any image based on a prompt.
• ·       All the written material in blogs, newspapers and other online written content became the training material for Large Language Models, we taught AI to read and write.
• ·       All the videos across platforms became the input for AI generated Videos, so now potentially I can create my own movie using video generation along with songs for good measure.
• ·       This is where I start to get controversial and of course I am wrong, all our conversations at home and on internet-based audio calls became fodder for voice and speech recognition and now one can have real conversations with AI and AI can even flirt! It is a known fact that the phone is always listening to you – remember Snowden?
• ·       All the code we wrote (using IDEs) to create wonderful software became input for the large language models, now AI can code in any language it is asked, a prompt is enough to write an entire program.
• ·       Our faces gave away our emotions, the cameras in our phones are always on and it may have been used to train AI models how to decode human emotions along with the tone of voice, thanks to all the video calls we did over the years?
• ·       We give away our knowledge by answering business and strategy related questions on professional platforms which becomes the fodder for specialized LLMs

These are just a few examples, there are many more. All these platforms have slowly and surely extracted human knowledge, skills, talent and potential and now made it available to all, perhaps this is democratic in a way. I am reminded of the series called ‘Black Mirror’ and some scenarios are already quite real now.

So, what is next?

One thing seems to be clear, ordinary humans  like me are out of the equation, everything that can be done by a human can now be done by AI, writing, painting in any style, composing music, singing, composing poetry, news reader, analysis, insights, information retrieval, creating presentations, writing minutes of meetings and these are just the ordinary capabilities. Nvidia just announced the concept of digital humans and NIMS, who / which can be trained to be anything, for example, a business analyst, a nuclear scientist, a domain expert on anything, it is all possible. These digital humans will speak to you in a friendly empathetic way, understand your problems in an organizational or business context and give you the solution and even implement the solution by allocating other digital humans or NIMS as necessary. Given this scenario, the lifespan of consulting companies and software development houses seems to be quite less…

It is a well-known fact that Altman has interests in almost all AI companies out there and recently there was an article in New York Times where the whistleblower from OpenAI Daniel Kokotajlo mentioned somewhat vaguely (he was under NDA) that there are secret projects underway in large AI companies which could change everything and could be potentially harmful for humanity and all this is coming by 2027. What he may have suggested is that all the AI power will be controlled by very few key companies and there is an urgent need for central governance, apparently, he also seemed quite scared for his life and future.

So, I think all IT professionals in all capacities should review and reflect and perhaps take up carpentry as a profession, there sure is a dearth of carpenters across the globe!