The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has brought the world into unknown territory. That’s good news for futurists like Amy Weber, who studies emerging technologies and uses quantitative and qualitative models to predict how they will impact business and society.
As founder and CEO of the Future Institute Today, Weber has grappled with artificial intelligence and all the fears it brings, from doomsday scenarios to market flash crashes and job destruction.
We caught up with Webb at the SXSW conference in Sydney earlier this week. (Questions and responses have been edited and condensed.)
How does artificial intelligence affect worker productivity?
Artificial intelligence can greatly improve productivity in cognitive jobs that require extensive reading, sorting, and tagging and are common in professional services firms, law firms, and investment banks. These tasks require less human time, and you can ask the AI system to find patterns you might have missed. That said, it’s still humans who use this technology. In many cases, we have ample technology around us, but people are less productive. Humans are biologically wired to consume as little energy as possible – it’s literally within our cellular structure – so I’m curious if this indulges our innate sense of laziness, and what that might mean .
What impact will artificial intelligence have on the job market?
People ask, “Will AI take my job? Or a bunch of jobs?” But no one asks how it will happen. We don’t have enough plumbers anywhere, do we? We have come a long way in medicine. You can use artificial intelligence systems with computer vision to spot anomalies. But for AI to truly replace knowledge workers, workers themselves will need to be trained to train these AI systems.
For example, some parts of the world offer medical students money to sit for eight hours a day and then click “yes or no” through a method called reinforcement learning, using human feedback as training. But this is ultimately just a drop in the ocean. It’s more productive to ask, “How will business models change in the future?” For example, hourly billing structures in some industries will have to change.
What are some of the artificial intelligence and new technologies that C-suite executives are talking about with you?
They are interested in having very basic conversations. To have more advanced, nuanced conversations requires leaning into uncertainty. A bank CEO recently asked me how artificial intelligence could reduce headcount. But if you start using AI just to increase your profits by lowering wages, you’re going to run into problems within a few years (or even sooner).
What should they think about?
Artificial intelligence is a set of different technologies that can be used to create tools. In a few years, they will need different types of work, so CEOs need to be very careful about making short-term decisions that can boost profits. The real opportunity is in revenue growth and figuring out where they can create new revenue streams, improve relationships and make it a force multiplier. This is where most leaders should be investing their energy right now, but I don’t think that’s happening in any country in the world.
What are some good AI-related questions that CEOs ask you?
They ask how we stay resilient and how soon we can lay off employees.
What are people confused about?
Currently, artificial intelligence has become the abbreviation of ChatGPT. The non-technical side of the organization just sees it as a text-based system that provides answers.
What’s the matter with you?
Once your material is used to train a system, how do you know who owns it and how do you monetize it? The real question should be: “Where is it getting its information from? Can I accept it? Do I trust it?” Once you leak your archive and allow it to be used to train an AI system, you can’t get it back.
What’s next?
Multimodal transport. This is having an artificial intelligence system that can do multiple things at the same time. Engage in different forms of logic, reasoning and analysis. So, given enough context, this can be used to address more complex challenges, or decision points that a leader may encounter throughout the day.
Are there any interesting examples of artificial intelligence you’ve tested?
I was giving a keynote address at a large financial services conference, and the panel in front of me was discussing loan syndication, well beyond my domain expertise. I copied and pasted the program and group member descriptions into several AI chat tools and asked each system on the group to tell me what the insights were. Aside from the charts, graphs, and verbal highlights that everyone brought to the table, there was really no discernible difference from the actual panel.
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