Your A.I. moment has already happened…
As you may have been hearing about for some time now, we are on the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Age; the age of interconnected sensors, instruments, and other devices networked together with computers' industrial applications and coupled with algorithms analyzing the usage data, creating solutions and new realities that we are barely yet coming to grips with. And yet, unlike past transformations we have experienced, the advent of this Fourth Industrial Age has likely passed unnoticed, like a tsunami racing below the surface of the ocean, destined to make landfall at some point in the future when the changed reality will be too great to ignore, catching many unaware and unprepared in the process.
To explain, I need to revisit a moment in the past when the coming of the Third Industrial Age, the information age, was upon us. This age was marked by the rise of personal computing, the internet and mobile communications. Information was becoming plentiful and the ability to manipulate and leverage said information was democratized. Further, I can recall the exact date and time I awoke to the broader implications of the Third Age. Anticlimactically, it was not a moment fitting of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. It did not solve the quest for fusion energy or cure cancer. No, it was a mere quest of leisure. An adventure in fly fishing.
The date was July 24, 2000, and to those of you who reside in Utah or happen to be Mormon, this date means something to you. To edify the rest, July 24, 1847 represents the date that Brigham Young lead the Latter-day Saints into Utah’s Salt Lake Valley and is now presently celebrated as Pioneer Days. The reason this is significant to my moment in the information age is I had scheduled a business trip into Salt Lake City that day, entirely ignorant of the holiday and realizing this about two hours prior to my departure!
Upon realizing my oversight, I hurriedly began doing Google searches on what, if anything, would be open in Salt Lake City during Pioneer Days (not much as it turned out) and what my options were. After a few searches, fly-fishing came up as an activity that would not be subject to the holiday closures and immediately caught my interest. I then switched my searching to local user forums (remember BBS’s?) and gleaned the most recent info I could find on the latest hatch on the Provo River and where I could access them in my rental car. An hour later with fishing gear in tow, I was headed to the Portland airport and within four hours of that fateful Google search I was knee deep in the Provo River, mending my line and doing my best to present fly patterns in hopes of a rising trout.
Image courtesy of Park City Chamber of Commerce
Reflecting on the day later that evening, the awakening to the moment was capturing my thoughts as much as the enjoyment of having been on the water that day – that what had made all of it possible was the instant access to information facilitated by this revolution in access to information. I have often thought of this seminal moment in the years since as I have leveraged this insight for my business and on behalf of my clients countless times over. Equally, as began to learn about the coming Fourth Age I have asked myself more than once, “when will my moment of awakening to AI come?”
It has already happened, and I didn’t notice it.
What is dawning on me as I have been diving into this seemingly bottomless well of theory and use cases (my current read on this is Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Links to Powell’s, or Amazon if you must) is I may likely not ever have that singular moment with the Fourth Age that I did with the Third, and for one simple reason: motivation to access.
My awakening to the power of the Third Age came about from a conscious effort to find something. I was trying to solve a problem. In that case it was information about a specific thing, fly fishing near Salt Lake City. The “intelligence” of the machines at that time were not capable of predicting my need for “things to do” during Pioneer Days, where to fish, or what flies to bring for an outing on the Provo River. While the information to solve that problem was much more easily accessed than a mere few years prior where it would have taken a series of phone calls to local fly shops and a significant more amount of effort to collect the information, and certainly not within the time I had just before my flight! But it still required a conscious action to search for it.
As we are beginning to experience in this Fourth Age, however, our reality is fundamentally being shifted by the solving of a multitude of mundane tasks through prediction. The complex algorithms of ML have been working tirelessly to solve simple quests and query’s, often before they even rise to the level of capturing our attention as problems needing to be solved. For the common user, the very nature of the “experience problem – solve problem” transaction is being reversed to the new reality of “experience solution” being initiated on our behalf, often without noticing until some point in the future when we realize what has happened.
A recent example of this was sometime in 2019 I began noticing my Gmail account highlighting un-replied emails at the top of my inbox that had been received a few days prior. The emails were highlighted with the comment, “Received two days ago. Reply?” Equally with un-responded sent emails, Gmail began to list them at the top of my inbox with the comment, “Sent 5 days ago. Follow up?” While un-replied and un-responded emails were not at the top of my problems-to-solve list, I am sure at some point and more than once it had crossed my mind that I did not respond to a particular email, or wondered if an email I had sent had been overlooked. Thus, Gmail’s ML solved a simple but effective productivity issue. And this is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
As Data Lakes grow exponentially ML algorithms are chewing through these vast pools of data, characterizing our usage patterns and behaviors, refining what and how the prediction models will meet our needs and desires of the future. It is not a far stretch to imagine a point in the near future when an email will appear in my inbox anticipating a fishing trip with content curated to answer everything I would want to know to get the most out of the expedition.
Without having ever asked for it.
As Neil Young aptly titled his late 70’s album Rust Never Sleeps, so can be titled here: ML never sleeps! Seriously, this should give us pause. Extreme pause. Beyond the simple convenience solutions being solved on our behalf, whether an entrepreneur, business leader or even individual contributor in a business, the bigger question you need to be asking is what automated solutions are being created by ML that will render your business/service/job irrelevant in the future? Amidst the current uncertainties of pandemics, social unrest and a politically charged election season, this is the question I am likely laying awake at 3:00am thinking about. While I am an optimist by nature and not yet willing to capitulate and run for the hills, in this evolving reality we cannot be complacent. So, what does one do?
Much easier to ask than to answer and this will be an area I will revisit in future posts but suffice to say if you are not yet versed in the basics of ML and AI then step one is to begin educating yourself. Now.
A good place to start is with Kai Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers (Powell’s Books; Amazon). Lee provides a compelling overview of the founding and development of AI, current state (as of the writing in 2018), and some sobering questions to ponder going forward. Full disclosure, this may feel a bit like a scared straight read however see it through and give yourself the opportunity to start considering how you will respond in this evolving era. Incidentally, in the beginning of the book it refers to China’s Sputnik moment as being when the AI research firm Deep Mind beat the World Champion player of Go, the oldest known board game (~2500 years) and known to be one of the most complex strategy games ever devised. YouTube has a full-length feature documentary titled Alpha Go for free viewing. I highly recommend it.
Lastly, as has been wisely said, “action cures all fear” and I suggest doing so by the action of educating yourself. As I have always experienced and even in the most uncertain circumstances, when I choose to educate myself first, the answers always follow.
One more thing… As an Advisor to owners and operators of small to medium sized businesses, I help solve big problems and assist my clients in achieving their goals. If you are, or know someone who is, a business owner looking for a fresh perspective or needing help in some way, I would welcome the opportunity to learn more. I can be reached here and please know that I treat all inquiries and referrals with the utmost responsiveness and professionalism. Thank you for your consideration! Rick
