AI Is Scary or Awesome, Depending on Where You Stand
Will brands do the right thing with the power of artificial intelligence? Brands use AI to collect information on us already, through our browsing habits, through beacons pinging our phones in stores, even with face and voice recognition. Information is power. Morality is not relative. But anyone’s view of AI will shift, depending on where they stand.
What got me thinking about AI and brands was a keynote by Jeremy Gutsche delivered at Trendhunter’s Future Festival in Los Angeles. (Disclosure: They invited me to the festival and I said I would write this article about it and do a podcast interview with one of the other Trendhunter analysts, Ady Floyd.)
“We use the word AI,” Gutsche said during his talk, “not realizing that it’s already embedded in so much of our life.” AI helps us swipe to find a match and gives us directions to a party. It seems friendly, ready to help, benign. That might start to change when AIs build other AIs, when AI programs itself, when systems create new systems. What happens when there is a super intelligence? “It will get scary or awesome. Depends on how you look at it,” said Gutsche, and he got a laugh with that line. It was uneasy laughter. My guess is that none of us in the audience knew where to go with the idea of super intelligence. We didn’t truly know where we stood on AI.
