I don’t really think machines will displace humans in significant numbers for a long time – but I do think we have an interesting time ahead of us where we let machines think on our behalf quite a bit .
Every company out there has rebranded themselves to an AI company . The first generation of this is broadly of two categories
1. Telling an AI system what we want to do – order a coffee , close the curtain – pretty much call an available API to do something
2. Use AI to learn and do something better – like switching carpet bombing marketing campaigns and target better
But this is just a temporary phase. Why do you want to ask your AI wizards to order coffee for your home – isn’t it better to let the machine reorder coffee when it gets to some level ? Should it even ask you to confirm these kinds of routine activities or just do it without asking ? About half the things I need routinely -I am totally cool with having a machine do it without asking me anything , especially about coffee . I get mad at myself when I forget to pick up coffee and I don’t have much left in the kitchen when I need my coffee . I am sure I am not the only one who is ready to offload some routine activity to machines .
So this poses some interesting challenges like- if my AI system is the one ordering groceries for me without my input , how do other coffee vendors ever get my business ?
My wife already thinks I spend way too much on coffee . So she maybe able to tell the AI system to limit my purchases to say $50 a month . So now my AI thingy needs to be coupon shopping and stuff to stay within budget – but that is easy, machines can do this math stuff better than us anyway .
This makes me wonder about what is the future of marketing itself ?
Simple – brands stop marketing to me and instead they ( as in their AI systems ) will market to AI systems ! And Brands will do whatever they can to convince my AI system to feed me their coffee first to increase their chance of my business being a reorder situation !
Well , guess what – this means we are in the “my AI is smarter than your AI” world at that point . The bright side – email spam reduces significantly for me as a human , and I have some more time on my hands .
But this is not without its share of dilemmas too – for example , what if the AI provider for me and the coffee company are one and the same , or if they are two companies that share my data ? Am I going to be put in a situation where I am negotiating against myself ? So we do need some clear guidelines established on ethics , legality, security and even morality before we get there to dealing with this problem .
We have a good grip on what happens when AI does smart stuff when humans deal with it – like customer service , sales etc . But the thing that excites me the most is when both sides of a transaction are AI systems . I am betting it won’t take even 5 years for us to see this mainstream . Are you ready ?
And Vijay Says... 
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