Liam Dunn: The AI ​​and New Tech Boom Has At Least One Advantage

opinion:

The problem isn’t smart computers, it’s stupid people.

It’s always the same with new technology.

It’s a story as old as the story – Pandora’s Box, the biblical tree of knowledge,
Golems, Frankenstein’s monsters, humans always pack it up.

The printing press was a great invention and is still alive and well in my industry.

But its arrival ushered in a social media revolution that really put TikTok in the shade.

What became nearly 200 years of religious wars began in Europe within 20 years of its invention.

AI has the potential to be a great new tool for humanity, but like many people, I am now pessimistic about the social disruption and radicalization that AI is about to cause.

I am a caring, sharing, and inclusive type of columnist. So when I say humans are stupid, I mean all of us collectively.

Personally, humans are usually very kind.

But we seem to be hardwired in our evolution to accept new tools offered to us, even if we’ve been forewarned of the risks.

And, well, were we forewarned about this.

People used to complain that the future didn’t offer us the utopias of flying cars and space travel that were promised in the 1960s.

Well my generation didn’t grow up like this Jetsons as much as possible blade runner, terminator and matrix.

So I guess I’m feeling a little optimistic about the dystopian stuff. I was expecting it for a while.

All of these popular movies issued specific warnings about a grim AI-driven future.

Since the early 1940s, author Isaac Asimov has been convinced that mankind will be destroyed by artificial intelligence, so he devised three basic laws to keep us safe.

“Robots cannot harm humans or cause harm to humans through inaction.

“Robots must obey orders given to them by humans, unless they violate the first law.

“A robot must defend its existence unless it violates the first or second law.”

We do have smart computers, so do we apply these rules?

No, of course not.

Apparently, they are impractical for technical reasons and are too ambiguous and can pose moral dilemmas.

At least that’s what ChatGPT told me.

But this is not meant to be another column of dystopian warnings about AI taking our jobs or ruining our art.

This started as an attempt to avoid writing about inflation and interest rates this week due to the large amount of OCR analysis done this week.

By that standard, I’m afraid I’m going to fail.

If humanity as a whole were a little smarter, we might have put the rapid development of AI on hold for a few years until we learned how to deal with the social chaos of the internet and social media.

Not that there aren’t many other things to focus on.

Perhaps we could have put a little more emphasis on decarbonisation, clean energy, cancer treatments and understanding viruses.

We’re slowly ditching those parts, but solving long-standing problems is a little less exciting than technology like creating bright, shiny toys to play with.

We can blame capitalism, but that’s just a reflection of our own obsessions. Money follows a path that creates more money.

Now money is flowing to AI.

A technology boom is underway in the United States, at a speed the green energy sector can only dream of.

The tech-dominated Nasdaq index is in bull market territory, up 22% year-to-date.

The more traditional Dow Jones and S&P 500 indexes posted near-zero gains this year.

These two indices include many real-world companies suffering the cost of inflation as high interest rates hit the recession and consumer spending fell.

I think the new technology boom is great for investors and could be good for our KiwiSaver account as well.

But what does that mean for the real economy?

Equity investors, especially tech investors, look ahead to current performance to look at future earnings potential.

They clearly believe that AI is going beyond the value of novelty to real business value.

We worry about our kids cheating on copyrights in essays and art, and other legitimate concerns (such as robot wars), but AI can also make boring business and manufacturing processes easier for us. It has been applied in ways that can be very beneficial.

AI has great potential to reduce costs and improve productivity.

No one makes a cyborg movie with a robot with an Austrian accent doing back-end work.

“We will be back again to optimize our supply chain.”

That’s the technological advancement we want.

AI can analyze global power usage, find inefficiencies, reduce utility bills, and clearly help the environment.

It may be a little optimistic to expect a solution to climate change, but it should be disinflationary in the short term.

It could bring good economic stability like we enjoyed in the 1990s and early 2000s, when computing and the Internet spread rapidly.

Anyway (I knew this column would come back here at the end), while I waited for the robot overlords to judge humanity as needless nuisances, I thought they were going to put us on high. I’m hoping that it might save me from inflation.

Interest rates may also go down.