Don’t Fall for the Hype or Hysteria About AI. Don’t be Complacent, Either.

If you’re trying to decide how to invest in Generative AI and ChatGPT, take special heed of Amara’s Law,

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

This caution is especially warranted for technologies that rocket so quickly from research playthings to media headlines, like ChatGPT. 

Don’t succumb to the hype or the hysteria. Don’t be complacent, either. Instead, before making any big decisions or strategic investments, take time to understand the technology and its applications, implications and limitations from your own organizational and personal context. And to really understand it, remember the observation of Marvin Minsky, the cognitive scientist and cofounder of the MIT AI Laboratory:

You don’t really understand something if you only understand it one way.

There are certainly widely divergent assessments of ChatGPT. Some observers are very hopeful. Bill Gates calls generative AI in general and Chat-GPT in particular “as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet.” Others, including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger and a host of other experts in and around the field, are fearful. More than a thousand have petitioned for a pause in further development due to worries about the “profound risks to society and humanity” that such systems pose, such as the risk of flooding our information channels with propaganda and untruth, automating away all jobs, and losing of control of our civilization. Yet a third group offers disdain. Noam Chomsky, who revolutionized the field of computational linguistics, recently wrote “it is at once comic and tragic that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing.” David Reed, a former MIT professor and senior technologist at several huge and startup technology companies, is more than unimpressed. He describes ChatGPT as “just an advanced Artificial Bullshitting Machine.”

If the experts can’t agree, how do you navigate the uncertainties and chart a reasonable course with this technology? 

The short answer is that you need to take the same disciplined, scientific approach to innovation that should be employed for all potentially powerful technologies: think big, start small and learn fast, guided by a robust future history.

In the case of ChatGPT, get a jumpstart on understanding and learning by getting beyond the generalities and examine this expansive field from your own context. From an organizational standpoint, how does it relate to your markets, strategy and comparative advantages? How might it boost how your organization can address important societal issues? From a personal standpoint, how does it relate to your professional and personal passions? How might it apply to your industry and functional focus? And, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, how it might help you make a dent in the universe?

ChatGPT and the rapidly expanding set of similar tools give you license to dream big and play hard—for relatively little cost.

For example, if you’re a visual artist, immerse yourself in the wide range of AI tools focused on art to get a first-hand understanding of how they might, or might not, actually transform art. If you’re focused on business development and marketing, experiment with how AI, ChatGPT and related tools might revolutionize customer discovery. If you’re interested in education, look at how Saul Khan and his team is exploring how to remake Khan Academy with these capabilities. If you’re passionate about addressing climate change, explore how you might use these tools to analyze vast amounts of data, such as weather patterns, satellite imagery, and historical claims data, to identify patterns and trends that may indicate an increased risk of natural disasters. If you’re involved in cybersecurity, explore how these tools can analyze large amounts of data to identify potential cyber risks, such as vulnerabilities in software and hardware, or unusual network traffic patterns. And so on.

It is important to explore not only the upsides but also the downsides, edge cases and failure points of this technology. AI tools are clearly powerful, but they can also be very brittle and display an amazing lack of commonsense. They can inadvertently perpetuate bias due to flawed data or poorly designed algorithms. They can stimulate concerns about privacy, misuse of data, and nefarious use by bad actors. And AI can provoke regulatory and customer backlash about automated rather than human-based decision making.

After a heavy dose of hard, hopeful playing, prototyping and learning, you will be more ready to get beyond others’ hope, fear and distain. 

You might, as I did, end up closer to the view of Rodney Brooks, a former director of the MIT AI Lab, who recently wrote, “Calm down people. We neither have super powerful AI around the corner, nor the end of the world caused by AI about to come down upon us.” 

Remember, however, even though no technology has yet to be a “super powerful AI,” many have been amazingly powerful enough to change the world.

But, whatever conclusions you come to, you’ll be more ready to start thinking big, really big, about how you might (and might not) be able to leverage this powerful technology in your own personal and business context.