The Truth About Technology & Change
Finding Useful Utility Functions for Generative AI
Over the last 1000 years, the relationship between technology and change has not changed much. Today, although AI is a big contributor to change, technology remains just one of the many important contributors to human advancement and the prosperity of societies.
Individual rights and democratic institutions, values, principles, invention and the entrepreneurship spirit, coupled with creativity and innovation are among the other central contributing factors to human progress. All of which are underpinned by learning and constant iterations driven through the sophistication of self-preservation.
The omnipresent and rapid advancement of generative AI has created a mindless enthusiasm about the likes of ChatGPT, for example, demonstrating how little we know about the relationship between technology and change.
Technology remains steadfastly a solution-tool, and AI is a very powerful technology tool no doubt but a tool nonetheless, in the historical context of technology and change. So technology development and the future of our civilization are too important to leave it in the hands of tech billionaires — corporations becoming the arbiters of our lives.
We must all be contributors and try to get a seat at the technology decision-making table. If not don’t complain about your suffering at the hands of deceitful players — some of the usual suspects: OpenAI/Sam Altman/Microsoft…Big Tech.
Too often we allow only the elites to define and represent technology, how it should reshape our lives through their selective innovations, and who should prosper from it. However, a thousand years of contemporary evidence tells us that our progress depends on the choices we make about technology. How technology can serve humanity best and not the other way around.
Nevertheless, the lessons of history still apply and like in the dot.com era, GenAI too will likely experience a similar faith. History also teaches us that usually, the first iterations of technology and things will look meaningfully different in the future. We possibly already seeing signs of this…of declining AI. The realization that AI is no magic bullet and that hype and fascination are not enough to sustain just hats but no cattle. At some point, AI must deliver authentic value like all other technology revolutions of the past had to do. It’s never any different this time.
Take a look at this fascinating graph below; maybe reality is setting in. Hard to predict but certainly the number below is telling us something that the intelligent person should pay attention to.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “Early Adopters of Microsoft’s AI Bot Wonder if it’s Worth the Money.” The article reports that many complaints about the AI aide that handles emails, meetings, and other things are becoming more trouble than it’s worth, users are saying. And the “price and limited use is leaving many skeptical.”
The WSJ tested “an AI Tutor for Kids. It Struggled With Basic Math.” That the “ChatGPT-powered bot, made frequent calculation errors during the Journal reporter’s test.” Furthermore, OpenAI’s new Sora release is showing it can’t reliably handle basic physics, ChatGPT is having unexplained meltdowns all over the place, and Gemini can’t even remember common knowledge historical facts, like who was on Apollo 11. And just today the CNN headline reads “Google halts AI tool’s ability to produce images of people after backlash,” after it was blasted on social media for producing historically inaccurate images that largely showed people of colour in place of White people.
So far, all we are getting from GenAI are promises, promises, promises; it is easy to make promises but much harder to come through on them. Like an opposition leader politician who promises the world, will find, if elected that governing is a different story. There are no guarantees in this world and promises are only comfort to a fool, so let us not try to become fools here. And imagine, Sam Altman asking for 7 trillion dollars to deliver more hallucinating garbage.
How technology should be used in the organization of production, how things are communicated and who controls them, are the critical points to understand. We can’t allow the narrow interests of the tech aristocracy to make the important decisions about our lives.
During the European Middle Ages as an example, the wealth generated by technological improvements in agriculture was captured by the aristocratic class and facilitated by its courtiers (VCs today). The wealth was taken to build grand estates and cathedrals, using religion to control the peasants who remained impoverished. What’s fundamentally different today?
The Industrial Revolution in Britain, for example, brought a new form of suffering for people. We saw those same peasants moving to the City of London from the countryside, forming a new reality — the new urban poor. Incomes for working people became stagnant while the wealth of the industrialists and aristocrats expanded enormously.
We also saw this in the Gilded Age of America, a period in the late 1800s of economic growth led by industrialization. So too, it represented a time of excessive greed and elitism, exclusion, great political corruption and excessive wealth and inequality.
Today, the new industrialization of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is once again having similar impacts on societies. This time the pain and suffering are coming from the tech industry’s self-interest — selling intelligent technologies that undermine peoples’ jobs through unnecessary and “excessive automation, massive data collection and intrusive surveillance.” According to MIT Professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in their book: Power and Progress — Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity.
Today, people are increasingly falling into the GenAI trap, an inverse and negative relationship to human intellectual thinking capacity. The willfully ignorant don’t understand that as they become more reliant on the likes of ChatGPTs for their fake knowledge. Their minds too become fragile and increasingly diminished and more vulnerable to being replaced by AI.
You end up as an empty vessel of nothingness with an enhanced vulnerability to noise and nonsense. You become controlled by Big Tech who has all the power over you. You give up your individualism and independence to acquire knowledge to build yourself up to effectively compete in the marketplace.
However, it doesn’t have to be that way, it is a matter of our choices…what we choose to do next with the technology we have. We all have access to the same AI, i.e., ChatGPT, and all the usual suspects. So it’s how we decide to purposely pursue and use the technology that counts most.
If we don’t critically think about our individualism and self-interest we allow our most important decisions to be made by a few hubristic tech billionaires.
6ai Technologies sees the world differently. How tech can be properly utilized in our best interest first. 6ai designs technology solutions that empower peoples’ critical thinking skills and sharpen their creative minds and innovative skills. Unlike Big Tech, we see great dangers for society if the underlying objective of AI is to rudimentary replace workers.
6ai Technologies proprietary applied intelligence (ai) solution-tool, instead, seeks to prevent us from driving to a world where people who want to do anything…the first thing they would do, is ask ChatGPT.
The role of a human in the world is to solve problems, not to go to ChatGPT for hallucinations and garbage. 6ai, through small and highly focused language models and a defined information retrieval process seeks to help efficiently, and effectively speed up the critical thinking process in humans through the proper utilization of computational power. For 6ai, GenAI is not technology to undermine and replace people, but to enhance their individuality and entrepreneurial drive, to allow them to stand out and be highly productive and progressive in the universe.
6ai offers a platform that anyone can use to learn, create and innovate with confidence — enhancing their human value and earning potential within a given organization and the universe. It powers the human mind to do extraordinary things — providing the strategy canvas to do things your way. Civilizations can’t grow and prosper if everyone is thinking the same way, and misusing GenAI technology in the process, to do so.
Therefore, the value proposition for 6ai is about how technology can be intelligently applied to deliver real business value. We don’t put the cart before the horse. We focus on our solution-tool and demonstrate its business utility first, not technical feasibility or distractive technology fascination. 6ai is not about building “generative AI” systems but providing the tools that anyone can use regardless of their technical skills.
Delivering value requires thinking differently. 6ai has the prompting functionality and robustness engineering to help us discover what we don’t know. It helps to refine assumptions on product marketing and associated costs, which allows for a proper assessment of core value propositions and how best to scale discovered opportunities. Most importantly, 6ai is about learning and doing better as you learn better; about relentless iteration while building toward success.
Our value proposition is to help anyone who has a genuine idea, develop it themselves. A do-it-yourself strategy development tool anyone can use…no complex software or digital tools required. For organizations and individuals to build relevant and actionable strategies at a very fraction of the time and the cost, of using useless consultants.