When the Internet was first introduced, I thought, wow, this is remarkable. The first times that I used the Internet I learned about email, about http and about chatting with people far away. I remember thinking to myself, this is going to change everything.
But as time went by, I realized that the Internet seemed more important to me than to the majority of the people around me. Even people that were my age and that had similar interests to mine, felt like the Internet was good, but far from life-changing.
As I explored the opportunities that it presented, I was so interested that it was impossible for me to devote a great deal of attention to mixing the Internet with my other passions. Since a very young age I liked using computers, cameras and anything with a battery. And as a grew older, I found my own voice in bridging the gap between the business world and the tech world that I was always rediscovering.
The Internet and Business
For years I applied myself in finding how could the Internet bring value to actual businesses. The obvious first choice for me was website design and SEO. It seemed almost evident for me at the time that if the number of people using the Internet was growing and the communication was becoming cheaper, it meant that for businesses the only real choice was to have a website and to optimize it to appear higher in all the search engines.
Today, I am presented with a similar incredible moment: ChatGPT. You may say, well, but ChatGPT is only a proponent of a bigger idea that we call Artificial Intelligence, and you would be right, however, the real explosion in awareness happened with ChatGPT not with AI.
For me, AI was revolutionary when I found it, but ChatGPT wasn’t around then, and my interaction with AI was on a simple request at a time. The genius came, when someone decided, this is better if works as a conversation, and indeed it was proven true by the millions of people who use ChatGPT.
As I ponder about the future, just like years ago in my exploration of the uses of the Internet for business, I wonder what the future will hold for AI as a tool for business. And I clearly see is that communication didn’t get cheaper this time, if anything, it got more expensive. What did get cheaper is human idea output. Ideas have very little value as long as they are kept in your brain. They may be great and beautiful, they are just not very useful, and also, often times they just vanish. But now, the ability that we all have to articulate ideas into the world, that “output” has been expanded and made easier.
Some people say that AI is going to take all of the jobs away and that it should be stopped. However, from where I see it, the same was said when the Internet was introduced, and non of that happened. Of course there were some people who lost their jobs because of the Internet, for example The Yellow Pages (the book.) But in general what happened was a somewhat moderate adoption of a new way of doing things. A new world of opportunities was opened and yet, only a few people where interested. Why? I think the reason is work. It takes work.
You may say, AI is making us work less and less, it makes things so much easier, but since I discovered AI, it has been anything but working less. Not to mention, I have had more chats in the last 3 months that in the previous 20 years. You may also say: chatting is easy. Prompting a computer to do a task by just asking seems at first like a very easy thing to do, after all, asking seems like something we do since we show up in this world.
The reality is that asking is a combination of art and science. If you want to get something in life you have to learn how to ask. And I would argue that most people that don’t have what they want is because they haven’t learned how to ask. The Bible puts it this way: Ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be open to you.
Some of us simply ask in a very primitive way. Some of us ask in negative ways. And yet some of us never ask at all.
Chatting is not easy. On the contrary, it is hard work. Why? Because you have to think and thinking is very hard. In fact, it is easier to go through life without thinking, just doing, just reacting.
In other words, yes, ChatGPT is being used by millions of people and growing and most importantly, it will continue to grow. But, I see this pattern:
The Internet made the communication cheap, and people started using the Internet to communicate. Ai made human idea output cheap, and therefore people will start using AI to output ideas. And there are various types of ideas, but good ones are not easy to have.
What I see happening is an exponential explosion of ideas, but 95% of those ideas will be of a very poor quality. Only 5% of the ideas will be great and within those, only 0.1% will absolutely remarkable and one of a kind. What is super interesting is that one idea that is incredible can change the course of everything.
The New World
The world has changed its speed of idea output. Before ideas where slower. And therefore as human beings, who are already saturated by everything we see, now we’ll probably have an even harder time filtering out the actual garbage from the good ideas. And therefore, even though output is cheaper, the actual identification of premium ideas will be even more valuable and expensive.
Do you want to have a job that AI can’t take away? Work at the highest level always. If you are a copywriter, sure, ChatGPT is making a conventional human-being into a much better copywriter, but that doesn’t mean that a copywriter + AI wouldn’t beat that any day. Also, be better than others at recognizing premium ideas. And even better, learn how to create high quality ideas at the new speed. You must learn to leverage artificial intelligence for your own situation.
Want to have a business that thrives under the new environment? Make sure that AI and Chatbots are part of your mix.
If you are a business owner and want to utilize any of these new digital technologies to advance your business, reach out to us and see how we may be able to help.