Elders wake up - Gen AI is yours!

What does Technology mean for us?

ChatGPT is in limelight. Elders are trying to figure out whether it is useful, safe, lawful, its human redundancy, disruption impact, etc.

What quickly came to my mind when I summarised are two classic examples of the dictionary and the calculator. In the 70’s, during schooling, we were purposefully taught to use the dictionary. It also extended to versions that gave you texts and synonyms and upto Wren & Martin. For tests or interviews, we had to know everything byheart. We were tested for what we remembered in memory.

Dictionary and its derivatives were systematically taken over by softwares. Remember the T9 Editor in Nokia phones and the blackberry. Now to say that half of an email is Generative AI if you are on google. We are mostly pressing the ‘enter’ button. If we answer the questions nudged above, we feel good and safe.

In the same 70’s the calculator also was becoming common. But we also learned the step wise calculation of MDAS operations going upto squares and roots. Even in shops the clerks had to calculate on paper and cross check on calci. For quite a period. Interestingly when spread sheets came and the operations were so many and complex, and rooms for errors nil, speed needed very high, we had a phase when the answer from spread sheet used to be cross checked on a calci. By then calci was trusted.

In between I spoke to BTech AIE students in a university. They are quite clear by their curriculum and course methodology as to difference from a normal CSE BTech. In layman terms when I used the term AI rather loosely, even first years were quick to tell me that so much is only computing. So AI is beyond the normal computing. Scope of AI is about converting the subjective (or organoleptic in science) to objective, and once it is objective, CS can process it. So if a dance program judge has to be replaced by a robot, it needs AI. If a radiologist need to be replaced by a robot it needs AI. But AI comes in with aggregated summary of learning from millions of data pieces that is humanly impossible. It can predict based on such millions of experiences and filtered to your values of dozens of parameters. Or take the case of those holograms into action or palm movement creating the music, AI gets amazingly woven around you and made for you.

When I compare the situation now, I feel same about chat GPT. There is no much of conventional chat in it, meaning nothing continuous about it. From search engines to choice engines, it is a paradigm shift. That ‘it is not connected to the internet’ was a complex statement that I took time to understand. Like in the 80’s we had the horoscope computerised but was not on internet. There was a period like that.

Database integration is happening at a frightful pace for CEOs. 7 year old data of taxes is being shared between IT dept and GST dept. There are many conflicts of data. We are answerable and it is further getting taxed. I was talking to senior executive from Google, and he said that as you use google ads to promote you products and get clients, if you feed the final sale identity back to google, it can further refine the prospects attracted thereby improving your CTR or lead conversions. When we know 3 aspects of a prospect, google knows 300. Coupled with subjective aggregation, it works wonders in your business.

These generative AI answers would become the base of managerial thinking process. You can’t start from where you are if it is behind GAI. Like we don’t force a college student now to write steps of a multiplication.

Then about safety of logins and passwords. The IT industry has an agenda of making us have log in into many sites and then regularly update our passwords. While updating they are forcing to create new one which has not been used so far. And to ‘help’ us here they have an automated key chain system to generate, store and apply such passwords. All in the name of safety. Thanks to covid, when india crossed into billions of digital transactions, it has become clear that we go by convenience and not by safety. We still have citizens who don’t use UPI in shops or with friends and don’t give their mobile number to their CRM programs. Are we saying that my phone number connected to my identity is confidential information or even classified? Are we confusing between nuisance avoidance with data safety?

The ecosystem that we elders should recognise is that Covid and the lockdowns have pushed the digital world 100 times or some 10 years ahead. Let us try to like it.