NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN ON A.I. FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Artificial Intelligence Embeds Across Sectors Without Heed to Its Human Impact 

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.”

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN BY HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Vote Like Your Kids' Lives Depend On It

And engage with them, to let them know they have a role in their own futures. After all, it was our kids who got us to stop smoking. 

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

JUN 18, 2024

 

We seem to spend a fair amount of time these days bemoaning and fearing for the fate of our kids and the next generations if the world’s woes continue to worsen, our climate and environment are further challenged, and our democracy is irrevocably damaged by demagogues and deluded doom scrollers.

Having daughters and granddaughters myself, I too fear for their futures, but I also ask myself from time to time whether they’re doing enough themselves to help their own cause. They can actually and actively have a role in helping us make things better. It’s long past time for another children’s crusade and there’s no more pressing time than right now for the kids to kick off their own campaign.

Pressure from our kids went a long way toward helping millions of their parents kick the smoking habit. Maybe a similar movement by today’s kids can help us save our democracy. All they need to do is to convince their indifferent, turned-off, or confused relatives to get out and vote in November. It’s our job to help them do precisely that. We owe it to our children to let them know what we believe, and if they differ with us, we owe it to them to be honest adversaries and to try and change their minds. And yes, the process works in both directions. It’s through honest discussions and confrontations that children grow into adults with a firm sense of their place in society and their own obligations and responsibilities as well.02:07

I was raised as a passenger in stinky, smoke-filled cars while my mother puffed away incessantly on her Kools or Kents or whether brand she favored at the time and generally refused to crank open the car’s windows because it might mess up her hair. This automotive experience pretty much soured me on smoking forever-- I complained constantly about it on every road trip. That’s important to appreciate because nine out of 10 current adult smokers started before age 18. Of course, we didn’t know or worry about the effects of secondhand smoke in the car back then and, if the truth be told, most kids then thought that it must be cool to be sucking those carcinogens into their little lungs and couldn’t wait to get started themselves. I guess we all figured that if it was good enough for our parents, how bad could it be for us?

It was the age of The Marlboro Man. Billboards, vending machines and cigarette butts were everywhere. Looking back at some of the classic romance films from the 40’s and 50’s, we’re amazed today to see that everyone smoked in almost every scene. No one seemed to care that their breath could readily peel the wallpaper off the wall and probably stop traffic as well. Teen role models at the time, like James Dean and Natalie Wood - the stars of Rebel Without a Cause - were rarely seen in real life without a cigarette even if the production codes at the time meant that they couldn’t be seen smoking in their films. Watching reruns of Mad Men which was set in the 60s, you wonder how so many people could be so stupid for so long. The recent Apple TV streamer Sugar with Colin Farrell, which seems to take place in old Hollywood, had so many characters constantly lighting up that it actually felt awkward and uncomfortable.

But eventually the times did change, and coffin nails began to fall out of favor, at least among sentient adults. Government regulation, aggressive litigation, and far better information distribution about the risks and harms associated with cigarettes helped to reduce their popularity and use. Social scorn, stigmatization, outright ridicule, isolation, and even pop culture also played a significant role.  In a TV episode of Happy Days, set in the 1950s but created in the 1970s, which was called “Smokin’ Ain’t Cool,” Joanie starts smoking to fit in with the “cool” crowd until Fonzie tells her that it isn’t really cool. And who would ever know better?

And, as noted above, the constant carping of millions of kids who learned at school and on TV just how bad smoking tobacco was for the health and longevity of their parents had a major effect as well. Lung cancer, lost limbs, emphysema, and other ailments and illnesses were no laughing matters and the kids made it clear that they preferred to have their parents stick around instead of dying young from some avoidable disease. I had a friend once who couldn’t stop speeding (and probably drinking) no matter how often his family begged him to slow down. The only thing that eventually helped was when his kids taped their pictures right next to the car’s speedometer to remind him of what he might any day leave behind if he was killed in a crash.

Today, we need to help the same kids to step up and educate, cajole and, if necessary, shame their folks and family members into voting because Trump and the MAGAts are a far worse cancer for our society than cigarettes. Children are the hope of the future--a cliché but nevertheless true. They need to convince their parents, grandparents, relatives and others that there’s nothing more important than stepping up and voting in this year’s election. Some 80 million people stayed home in 2020 and didn’t vote. We can’t let anything similar happen in 2024 and our kids can help make the difference.

There are clear and easy answers to all the lazy, tired and foolish excuses we’re hearing every day from those who choose to ignore Hunter Thompson’s sage warning that: “the only people who really know where the edge is are the ones who have gone over.”  We’re all on that very precarious edge and that’s not a risk that any of us can afford to take or ignore. The idea of voters wishing for “a pox on both their houses” and deciding to simply sit this election out is essentially admitting that they have no interest in the future of their kids’ or their country’s lives. Cleverly writing in bogus, made-up or fanciful names on the ballot is more than just a waste of your precious vote, it’s a waste of what little voice you might hope to have in the direction in which our country is headed. And saying that your vote won’t matter anyway is probably the worst cop-out of all because we know, unfortunately, that this election will likely be even closer than the last and every single vote in every city and state will absolutely matter in the final analysis.

Whoever anyone may vote for, the one thing that is absolutely clear is that we all must vote in November and encourage everyone we know to do the same. At the end of the day, it’s not simply what you do for your kids or tell them to do, it’s what you’ve taught and shown them to do for themselves that will help to make them into concerned and effective citizens.