AI: Today's Flavor, Tomorrow's Challenge

🚀 Discover how AI is shaking up the world as today's flavor and tomorrow's biggest challenge. Join The Water Trough with Ed Drozda as we dive deep into AI's impact on business and beyond. Tune in now for a thought-provoking journey! #AI #SmallBusiness #TheWaterTroughPodcast 

Transcript

Ed Drozda 0:09

Welcome to The Water Trough, where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Welcome back to The Water Trough, folks. This is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor. Throughout our history, the human race has had so many critical, profoundly important developments that have impacted not only our survival, but our ability to evolve in ways that we could probably never have imagined. Among these profound developments, the discovery of fire, the automobile, the telephone, the computer, and the Internet. At the time each of these things came to be, I like to think of them as flavors of the day. When a novel idea, a novel capability, a novel tool becomes available, we immediately latch onto it. And with the evolution of communication, we're able to disseminate that information so rapidly that others not only learn about it, but learn about it very quickly. In so doing, we create this spark, this desire, this need to have these things, hence the flavor of the day. For a while, the flavor of the day is the thing. Everybody wants it. Everybody needs it. Everybody seeks to have it. At some point, and of course it varies for different things, that enthusiasm wanes. We all take energy for granted. Likewise, we take the ability to communicate effectively, such as the phone, for granted. Of course now the telephone does vastly more than it did back in the day. As far as the computer is concerned, once again everyone has one, right down to the wristwatch on your arm, and the Internet has opened up information to us in ways that we could never have imagined possible before it came to be. Each of these things have passed through the flavor-of-the-day state, and is currently something that we take for granted. It seems to me that energy, transportation, communication, the computer, and the Internet all have one common theme. That theme is that each of these things requires our input. In fact, they were designed in this way. They were designed to be used in this way. Energy has to be created, disseminated, and utilized by us. Transportation, at least for the time being, is something that we engage in, whether we drive the automobile, we fly the plane, we captain the boat. Communication is between people. It is our means of conveying, of sharing information, with others. It requires our input. The computer, with all of its vast power provides information that we act upon, that we are responsible for utilizing. Then finally the Internet, which contains vast quantities of information, but once again it's information that we as humans are interacting with. Each of these items not only allows us to interact, but they require that we interact in order to make the most effective use of them. Now then, let's look at the current flavor of the day, and that would have to be artificial intelligence, AI. I'm pretty sure everybody can agree that the flavor of the day is AI. In fact, some might say that AI has such potential to change the evolution, the state of the human race, that it might be one of the most, if not the most profound changes that we've ever experienced. AI is not like its predecessors. Of the profound changes that we've experienced over the course of human evolution, AI has a different look and feel. The examples that I provided here, communication, energy, transportation, Internet, and computer, each of them shared the common thread that humans are expected to utilize the tool and to interact with the tool to achieve the expected outcome. To some degree, the same can be said for AI. After all, humans are creating AI. But AI has the potential, it has been demonstrated, to become self-evolving and to grow in ways that might not be anticipated by the developers. At the very least, our human interaction could be the difference between using AI for good things, and using AI for negative things. And of course, the same could be said for any other tool. Humans, in their interaction have the ability to impact the way things are utilized and have most certainly utilized things with negative effects. In the case of AI, I believe it's different than that. I believe that AI doesn't or in time will not require that we provide input. I strongly believe that in time, whether we choose to use it for good or not, AI will have the ability to reason on its own. I think back to the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", and I can't help but to believe that Hal is a distinct possibility. One thing is clear. AI inspires a lot of conversation. It inspires a lot of excitement, a lot of questions, and a lot of fear. Each of these things is distinctly human, and each of us has our own position as to how these things will be managed. For myself, I can say with clarity today that I'm quite reserved about the future of AI. I strongly believe in the creativity of humans, and therefore I don't see a place for AI in creating materials that could come from an individual. Although I recognize that there are those of us who will feel left out if we're surrounded by others who do use AI and produce what might be considered superior creative output than those of us that choose not to go that path. I'm here to inspire thought. There are different sides to the equation. This is mine, and I'm hoping that it will give you reason to consider your own position and what matters to you. I'd love to hear from you with your thoughts, and I encourage you to write in or to tag with a comment wherever you're finding this. Folks, this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and here at The Water Trough I can assure you of one thing. At least for today I am a human, and I did actually create this episode. Hope to see you soon. In the meantime, take care and be aware.