Why People Will Thrive with AI, If They Can Trust It

Is AI going to cause the extinction of humanity as some authorities fear or save the world as venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz speculated recently? I don’t think businesses have the time to ponder that existential debate. The businesses that want to survive need to unlock the ways that AI unleashes human ingenuity. Those that crack the code will not only survive amid the proliferation of AI but flourish in ways they could not dream possible. But this will not be easy, and there will be major downsides to the growth of AI. To truly innovate amid growing pains, businesses may need to look at applications outside their industry

Consider what’s happening in Ukraine. A badly outmatched Ukrainian military has done the impossible: punish a well-equipped Russian invasion force. How? Well, AI plays a role – but it’s not the real answer. Resourceful and creative Ukrainians have been deploying AI to conduct cyber warfare and gather pinpoint intelligence behind the battle lines. In war zones, soldiers have adopted AI-powered drones to conduct highly precise attacks on Russian targets in ways that minimalize the vulnerability to Ukrainian troops – a more effective way for David to fight Goliath.

But AI isn’t doing the fighting. Ukrainians are using AI as part of an ingenious, highly mobile shoot-and-run style of fighting. This is human ingenuity at its peak. Humans are in charge, not AI. This reality contrasts sharply with how Scale.AI founder Alexandr Wang describes the application of AI in warfare. In a November 2022 article, he practically characterizes as both the thinker and the doer, fighting battles autonomously. He overstates the role of AI. Despite what Wang believes, humans are in charge, not AI.

Humans are in charge beyond the battlefield, too. For example:

• In India, farmers are applying AI to enhance their agricultural practices and improve crop yields in a more sustainable way, in areas such as crop monitoring and management and smart irrigation. Roughly half of India’s population depends on agriculture for its livelihood, and the country has the second largest arable land area in the world. India needs its farmers to have a future as a country. The farmers respond with ingenuity and adaptability.
• AI powered drones are being used to save lives in Africa. When hospitals in remote places need blood, delivery on treacherous roads can take too long, endangering lives. So, a start-up known as Zipline has solved the problem by making it easy for medical personnel to order blood with a text and receive it faster than ever before. In Rwanda, doctors are using drones to drive down the risk of mothers dying in childbirth, which often occurs as a result of blood loss. The system uses AI to manage the entire delivery process, from the moment an order is placed to the time the drone returns to its base. This is a result of human ingenuity – not AI. In the business world, of course, this technology is already being applied in more prosaic but impactful ways, as Walmart’s use of drones illustrates.
• Academics are using AI to read ancient Mesopotamian literature, giving them a better understanding of the evolution of civilization. Readers of ancient text are overcoming the frustration of reading a fragmentary text because AI digitally brings together transliterations of fragments of cuneiform tablets. Academics can use these tools to reconstruct partly lost ancient texts. This is a brilliant use of AI that has direct application to any business that needs to perform complex translations of language at scale, as happens in the localization industry.

Andreessen Horowitz eloquently argues that AI is just beginning to augment that marvelous machine known as human intelligence:

. . . human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead, we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.

The post argues that “anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.”

I actually think Andreessen Horowitz undervalues AI. My belief is that AI won’t augment intelligence. It will amplify intelligence in ways we are still figuring out – like a supercharger in a car engine.

But for AI to reach its potential, human beings have to trust it. They need to be at the center of every use of AI. The disruption of knowledge workers by AI that we continue to read about, while painful and difficult, is part of difficult transition happening now. Businesses that apply AI responsibly will succeed by demonstrating the successful uses of AI to improve our lives instead of replacing people. They’ll attract the best talent and make the most impact. But the journey will be rough. It already is. Consider the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America – one in which AI is a major sticking point. Now multiply the intensity of that strike many times, and you get a sense of the labor unrest – and civil unrest – that could await the world.

What is business to do? This gets back to the main point of my post. Businesses cannot wait around and watch a debate. They need to act by applying AI responsibly and be part of the solution to making AI trustworthy. To learn how to do that, contact Centific. That’s what we do whether we’re using AI to make retail shopping safer or to translate languages all over the world for content creators.