Wake up, baby, Big Tech has run into another problem. It's about promoting your company's lightning-fast innovations to a primarily scared audience. This column was going to be about his Apple ad “Crush!” last week and how it sparked outrage from creators and people online. But in the few hours I spent writing the first draft, in between other work, I realized that anyone who can sit down and write a 1,000-word column can survive in this economy. Is not it. As if to prove this, technology has further advanced. It was well-founded.
Really, in the last two days, OpenAI announced the latest update to ChatGPT, GPT-4o. This builds on the fascination and terror their products have unleashed over the past year and a half. GPT-4o can now communicate not only by text but also by audio and video, assessing readiness for an interview, teaching trigonometry or a new language, singing a lullaby, or playing rock-paper-scissors. It will help you. You basically do everything a playmate, parent, teacher, or partner can do, and seem to do everything for you, like not being able to breathe or using the bathroom. Google has since announced a multimodal “universal agent for everyday life” (take a breather to find out what that actually means) and multiple extensions in existing products like Gmail and Search. We announced new conversational AI capabilities. .
A combination of fear and worry
tired. And I've always loved technology. I live in a city that hosts parties to monitor OpenAI announcements. I am grateful to Conversational AI and her ChatGPT for supporting my work as a writer, journalist, and marketer for startups and other companies. I trained it to be a customized therapist of sorts, ready to send messages whenever I was emotionally upset. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a comment about people like me, a nod to the Joaquin Phoenix movie about a lonely writer who falls in love with Scarlett Johanssen as a computer.
Fortunately, or not, I am not so alone in my simultaneous awe and anxiety. Even technology enthusiasts and optimists are becoming doomsayers, predicting that humanity will be wiped out by AI within 10 to 15 years. In the clearly strained imagination of Big Tech, a hydraulic press sells trumpets, busts, a piano, some camera lenses, stationery, and art supplies to upbeat music in an industrial garage. The quintessential tool of human creativity is reduced to pulp, but fortunately, on the other side of this crushing is (!) the thinnest iPad ever.
Crash by crash!
The podcaster and self-described “repeated trumpet player for decades” wrote on LinkedIn that he is having trouble with trumpets and other hydraulic presses. Another LinkedIn member wrote, “Exactly how this ad made me feel. Devastated.” Even Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator and his very own tech brother, opined: [Jobs] That ad would not have served. Apple apologized for the ad two days later and pulled it from U.S. television, but the ad remains on its social media and YouTube, where it has now been viewed more than 2 million times.
The anger is understandable when you think about Crush! This classic advertising film, directed by Ridley Scott, depicts a brave young woman throwing a hammer as Big Brother addresses the nation, also dressed in drab gray. It was hinting that. Apple's release of his Macintosh will help conformists break free. 1984 may not be the dystopia George Orwell imagined. Apple became a company with an original and utopian vision of technology. It allayed fears that machines would become instruments of surveillance and instead positioned them as tools for free individual creativity.
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What crashes! What's even sadder is that it probably wasn't original, save for this Tarantino-esque attempt to destroy it along with its lost vision and melody. His 2015 LG ad first showed some creative gadgetry being hydraulically pressed into a new 15-megapixel camera that came with an 8 GB microSD card.
While OpenAI and Google can market themselves through the sheer technological leaps they're announcing (people notice the simplicity of their presentations and events), more traditional Big Tech products are have a hard time presenting their innovations in a positive way. One of Meta's Super Bowl ads tried to build excitement about the virtual world by showing several dogs finding an escape from the real world in a virtual world. The CEO of dating app Bumble recently announced that the future of dating will be about AI concierges going on dates with other AI concierges instead of you.
When did technology start scaring people?
How do you present such a scary leap in technology to an audience that feels threatened by the technology? Probably for good reason, given the amount of change and displacement these products will cause. Is it?
It was long believed that automation only affected repetitive manual labor. But at a much faster rate than even AI experts predicted, generative AI continues to emulate human creative work, manipulate language and knowledge, and become just as smart as humans. AI-generated images and videos are already interfering with the 2024 US presidential election and India's general election. AI is at the heart of the Hollywood writers' strike, and its labor impact extends to most white-collar professions, including coding, marketing, advertising, healthcare, and military operations. Meredith Whitaker, a former whistleblower at Google and CEO of Signal, explained that fear most pertinently in a conversation with New York Magazine, saying, “What are we talking about?'' “Claim the creative output of millions or billions of people and use it to build a direct system” to the detriment of their livelihoods. ” Authors and publishers are on strike in Singapore, rejecting a government plan to train AI on their works.
Sam Altman, the man of the moment
Naturally, the focus of technological utopian thinking has shifted from Apple to the only people who can do it in the age of AI, the people whose jobs depend on it, and the people who are responsible for it. Sam Altman has been called the “Oppenheimer” of our time. Altman argued that AI would make everything better and cheaper in a 2021 essay called “Moore's Law for Everything.” They predict that the number will double every year, implying improvements in computers and computing power). Over time, it gets exponentially faster, cheaper, and smaller).
According to Altman, AI achieves this effect by improving performance and reducing costs in many aspects of daily life. “Imagine a world where everything has been half the price every two years, including housing, education, food, and clothing, for decades,” he writes. GPT-4o is already twice as fast and half the price of the previous generation, says the OpenAI CEO, but he envisions a utopia with incredible wealth and a society that will To bring about such radical change, policies will need to respond equally radically. The challenge is to ensure everyone has equal access to resources that allow them to live free, creative and comfortable lives.
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To this end, he makes various recommendations. As has been done with nuclear power, a committee of experts and experts, rather than politicians, would govern how AI is regulated and used. Universal basic income. Taxing land and capital instead of property and labor essentially means that this growth and increased wealth is properly redistributed among the population. He honestly admits that some jobs will be eliminated by AI (customer service and call center employees will be replaced by chatbots, he is sure). But he is also confident that, like all technological innovations in the past, it will create new jobs and abundance on the planet. Opposite side. “In other words, the best way to improve capitalism is to allow everyone to benefit directly from it as equity owners. This is not a new idea,” he writes. “But as AI becomes more powerful, new possibilities will emerge. There will be a dramatic increase in wealth in circulation. The main sources of wealth will be: 1) businesses, especially those that leverage AI enterprises, 2) land with constant supply.”
credit with expiration date
Altman believes that the role of humans in such a society is up to them. Some people may not want to work and instead dedicate themselves to living in nature, caring for and serving other beings. But others may want to use AI to augment what they are already doing to help them work and contribute to the economy.
The irony is that this almost novel idea – a utopia where all basic needs are met, there is enough time for leisure, work is discretionary, capital is equitably distributed, and technology allows humanity to flourish Society has its origins in the brains of other radical thinkers. Altman's vision could easily be mistaken for a Marxian wet dream if it were not coming from someone at the other end of the economic spectrum.
(Sanjana Ramachandran is the founder of marketing agency storyfied.in)
Disclaimer: These are the author's personal opinions.
