AI is becoming a part of
of our everyday lives, whether we like it or not.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
JAN 28, 2025
Senior education officials,
regulators, and media mavens all over the world have been focused for some time
on the issue of how teachers will be able to distinguish between materials
written by students and those created by technologies driven by artificial
intelligence. Interestingly, the majority of educators who work in the field
every day with students don’t think this is much of a concern. They know their
students, they know their respective abilities and capacity, and frankly they
only wish their students were smart, motivated and talented enough to try to
accomplish such a feat of prevarication.
Another interesting discussion is
taking place in the work world. It’s everywhere. Consider the controversy from
the movies, which are now all a twitter (no pun intended) about the AI-based
voice enhancement technology used to improve the authenticity of the Hungarian
voices in The Brutalist movie. Then there’s the magazine
world: the not-too-distant but humiliating discovery in 2023 that articles
in Sports Illustrated were actually AI-written and
attributed to non-existent authors. Which, by the way, also had headshots. No
one complained about the content of the stories, they were just apparently
horrified by the process of computers replacing copywriters.
All these concerns stem from fears
arising in two different areas. First, there is anxiety across industries about
job elimination through automation and A.I. implementation. And, second, the
increasingly prevalent idea that we are all less able to tell the difference in
so many ways between men and machines.
Plenty has been written about job
losses, but we’re just beginning to realize how exposed and how unaware we are
of the extent to which our expanding and encroaching technologies have subtly
and unobtrusively invaded and subsumed so many aspects of our day-to-day lives.
One of the most simple and obvious examples is captchas. We now take for
granted and unironically that it’s become our daily job to repeatedly prove to
computers that we are real human beings before they permit us to get on with so
many different activities and transactions. For the moment, it seems that we’re
all stuck with technology, when all we really want is stuff that works.
Real-World Insight
The problem is that our technology
development work is so completely focused on the future that we seldom, if
ever, look backward. As a result, rather than learning from mistakes, we are
doomed to keep repeating them and forgetting the lessons that we should have
painfully learned by now. As a result, we quickly come to depend on these new
modes of assistance and support. At the same time, we become fearful because we
know that there are aspects of their operation and abilities that we can’t
entirely control. I’m not talking about Skynet and Arnold. But some more
subversive undertakings are superficially attractive, clearly less threatening
at the moment. These are designed to replicate, impersonate, and deal directly
with other machines and computers “as if” they were human.
With the announced and accelerating
rollouts of agentic tech, I believe that we’re on the cusp of another deep
technology rabbit hole which we’re largely unprepared for and ill-equipped to
deal successfully with. What we never seem to appreciate is that when we
develop new disruptive tools and technologies, we immediately seize on the
initial implementations and put them into action before we remotely understand
them in their entirety. Much less consider their unforeseen and consequential
longer-term effects, or even appreciate how long and costly a process will be
required to understand how to best put them to use. Every new technology is a
package deal, which brings its own negativity right along with all its
benefits.
The recent unveiling by OpenAI of
its new agentic offering called Operator is the latest
clear step forward, for better or for worse. Incorporating computer-using
agency, along with the ability to interpret and act upon handwritten lists and
other images, Operator – for all intents and purposes – looks to other
computers like a human operator who is using both a keyboard and a mouse.
Already connected to Open Table and Instacart among other apps and services,
Operator can seamlessly book tables and reservations, order tickets, select
groceries, and initiate regularly scheduled tasks with very limited, if any,
human intervention once the process is set in motion. Only at the final moments
and specifically when payment information and confirmation is required does the
system pause and ask for approval before proceeding. It’s only a short further
step to complete autonomy and reaching the point where, as the late great
singer-songwriter Jim Croce sang in his version of his hit Operator,
“There’s no one there I really wanted to talk to.”
AI Anxiety
If this prospect doesn’t recall
the frightening scenes from Fantasia where
the unstoppable brooms carrying buckets of water marched ceaselessly forward
and step right over poor Mickey, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, then you’re simply
not old enough or a fan of classic Disney movies. Embedded in this fantasy is a
real warning which has even more direct and important application today. It’s
not difficult to imagine even more sophisticated and fully automated onslaughts
launched against ticket sellers or new and more convincing scams and frauds
using data and imagery extracted by these new tools.
A photo of a handwritten shopping list
– as used in the Operator demo video – seems innocent and harmless until you
realize that you’ve provided the digital world with the ability to readily
replicate your cursive signature. This may matter less as we move forward, and
the schools completely abandon any effort to teach our
kids how to sign their names on documents or even write properly and settle
instead for block printing.
Bottom line: Here we go again on a
wild chase into the future without any clear end in sight or a sufficient
understanding of the risks involved or how they might be limited or
circumscribed. We’re buying the ticket, closing our eyes, and taking the ride.
As the late Hunter Thompson used to say: “There is no honest way to describe
the edge because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who
have gone over.”
