Imagine if the Luddites had won. We’d still be toiling at looms while our children pluck stray cotton from between the rollers.
Or worse, the Luddites’ agrarian predecessors, the Muddites, might’ve kept us out in the fields all day long. I can’t imagine my kids keeping a potato on their plate, let alone digging one up.
The steady march of technology improving our lives has withstood all sorts of ridiculous attempts to stop it. Even the Japanese couldn’t keep tech out during their isolationist period.
They eventually gave up and rapidly became rich by copying foreign technology instead of shunning it. And now we have the likes of this to be thankful for. Best of all, it’s free thanks to technology.
Not that the Luddites have gone away. They’re still busy warning about what new technology will take away from us. Despite a preponderance of take-away technology to give them food for thought.
Of course, nothing stops you from operating a loom or growing your own food. It’s just that most of us have better things to do with our time. And that’s the whole point of technology. It makes things efficient, which frees up time to do something else. Whatever that something else is, is what we gain from the technology.
Unfortunately, this relationship seems to be beyond Luddites’ grasp. Perhaps because they spend the free time that technology gave them on campaigning against it. It’s like those socialists preaching the Little Red Book on their iPhones. No sense of irony.
Modern Luddites are far more tech savvy than their forebears though. And Artificial Intelligence has them in a bigger frenzy since someone invented the wheel.
Can you imagine what that poor bugger had to go through? The job losses anticipated by economists at the time must’ve been terrifying. The wheel would’ve been public enemy number one.
Perhaps the Luddites have already lost. AI is everywhere now. Not that much has changed. It’s just that things get labelled AI to make them seem more fashionable.
A resort I stayed at last year has AI lifts, the receptionist told us. Indistinguishable from regular ones, though.
Writers use AI to create a report out of a few dot points. And then that report is summarised by AI into a few dot points for the impatient reader.
Apparently AI girlfriends are the rage. But do they really listen any better than the real ones?
I tried to use Australia Post’s AI chatbot last week. But it didn’t seem to know that International Registered Post provides neither tracking nor confirmation of receipt. If AI is as misinformed as the staff at the counter, then being more available doesn’t really improve things.
My internet search engine claims to be AI too. It’s only better to the extent that the non-AI version got mysteriously worse.
Perhaps that’s AI’s nefarious plan for world domination. We won’t even notice it taking over. Because it’s no different.
But I suspect it’s more that AI really was everywhere long before we began to call it that.
So, not many industries stand to be revolutionised. The few that will, however, are worth paying attention to…
AI’s real beneficiaries
Over at Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence Australia, we’ve come to the conclusion that AI will benefit three industries disproportionately.
And our report detailing which stocks will harness those gains comes out tomorrow. Unless you’re a subscriber already. In which case, you should be reading those reports instead of this.
What the three industries have in common is large amounts of data needing to be understood in a coherent way. Humans don’t always know what to look for. Or they can’t handle the amount of data being provided.
That’s where AI can help.
But here’s the bit to focus on: help.
That’s all AI will ever be able to do.
AI remains pretty useless in isolation.
A lift or car that takes you where AI thinks you want to go would be worse than useless.
Even AI doesn’t know what you want to know until you ask the right question. And that seems to have become an entire industry, called ‘AI prompts’.
AI’s ability to predict what you want to eat is proving counterproductive for me personally.
And the advertising AI dishes out on my digital life is distressing to say the least.
If AI can’t even figure out what language I speak, what chance of replacing me has it got?
All it can do is enhance my own productivity…at best.
But there’s another reason why AI will never beat us. We’re too flawed, unpredictable and odd.
Even if AI outdoes us by every performance metric, our human nature will remain our own. Our intelligence will never be artificial. And so AI will never be able to replace us.
But it could make you wealthier. Tomorrow, I’ll show you how.
Until next time,
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Nick Hubble,
Editor, Strategic Intelligence Australia
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