Text by Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital.
The 2023 version of the annual Tech Trends study that the Future Institute releases every year, with over 1 million downloads annually, opens with Amy’s advice: “This year requires focus.” It then lists the massively impactful transformations that we are on the cusp of seeing.
Dear Amy, your warning is more than necessary, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Focusing as a way of life has never been easy for anyone at any time. The advice is wise, but I fear it’s unlikely.
After reading the executive summary of Tech Trends, the most likely response for anyone is…I want off this planet.
Of course, there are numerous advances that will profoundly and positively transform dozens and dozens of areas of human knowledge and practice. For each one, a warning is attached that tech advances can also be misused or used for evil by scientists, institutions, companies, and governments. As always.
That’s where focus becomes unfocused. The hope is that the science of machines and the machines themselves, with their own intelligence revolutionized once and for all with Generative AI, can give us a helping hand. We won’t be able to do it alone.
Generative AI, as the study teaches us, is the foundation of all the other predicted transformations, as all advances will be built with, on, and through it in the 20 sectors/industries/knowledge and science areas analyzed by the document. All of us, society as a whole, our companies, and governments from all countries will inevitably be impacted. And, as I mentioned, without much or any control over it all.
Creative production and the discovery of knowledge advances will be diversified and accelerated by algorithms, which will, in turn, be increasingly created by the machines themselves. Advances considered distant and even impossible to achieve by medicine will be available to us in a short time. The financial market will be decentralized and open, as will the entire internet. Which will be another internet. Drones and robots will be more accessible and increasingly present in our daily lives. The most directly affected industries will be automotive, aviation, pharmaceuticals, and the entire content and media production sector. Agriculture too. Services such as retail and the entire supply chain, as well as real estate, will operate in a significantly different way than they do today. In short, look to the side, and there she is, Generative AI, as present as a cell phone in our pocket, to use an image from Greg Brockman, founder and CEO of OpenAi, who created ChatGPT, in his appearance at SXSW this year.
The magic and advancement of this new AI lies in its ability not only to solve certain specific problems but also, and mainly, in its ability to create new concepts and ideas, the foundations of human knowledge.
Amy and her futurists believe that the Generative AI we have today, the one you and I use to play smart today, will become generic and commoditized. And that it will be in specializations and notably in infrastructure areas that the real big businesses will emerge.
The study also assumes that it will continue to be the big tech corporations and large business institutions in general that will take the lead in this endless race for progress.
The fear that governments and companies will continue to use this type of technology to control significant parts of our lives persists. Perhaps now even more amplified.
So I ask myself, focus on what?
Text by Pyr Marcondes, Senior Partner at Pipeline Capital.
Article originally published by Meio&Mensagem.
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