My June 2024 Newsletter

Zurich, Switzerland, June 15, 2024. Also available here.

Greetings dear subscribers, friends, colleagues, partners, clients and media contacts! Start with a laugh: watch my AI-Avatar Greeting (permalink here)

First, I’m delighted to report that I’ve been rapidly gaining subscribers on my ‘GerdTube’ Youtube channel — over 290k as of today (1000+ videos since I started in 2006!). Thanks to all of you who have been watching and sharing my keynote videos, films and shorts.

To make it less confusing for my English-speaking audience, and easier to find find my new dubbed content we have launched 3 new Youtube channels in German, Spanish and Portuguese. These videos are made possible via a collaboration with the amazing folks at Rask.ai, enabling me to use AI to overdub many of my keynote videos and films, using my own voice (sorry, no lip-synching yet). I think the dubs are pretty cool! Not perfect yet, of course, but offering a pretty amazing solution if you don’t speak English well enough to follow my often fast-paced talks. Here is the Rask case study on how this all came about, if you’re interested.

Beyond the dubs, we’ve made a few changes on my main Youtube channel as well, hopefully making it easier to find things:

• You can now view all my latest YT Shorts here (a good choice if your attention span is less than 50 seconds:)
• All my longer talks on AI are now on this playlist
• All my films can be found on this playlist
• My last film, LookUpNow, on AI and the Future of Humanity, is available here (site) and here (YT)
• Many of my videos and films can be downloaded via my Vimeo channel, as well

AI: A GOLD-RUSH, ANOTHER BUBBLE, OR A NEW ARMS-RACE? HEAVEN OR HELL?

It sometimes seems that everything is about AI, now. Yes, even me: TheGerd.ai:) This will certainly normalise soon, but I don’t think we’ll see a significant AI disillusionment period anytime soon, as we did with the Metaverse. AI is clearly a general purpose technology (like electricity, cloud-computing or mobile) as well as the new ‘platform for everything’. For context, check out my latest presentation excerpts on Flickr.

To kick things off, here is the Gerd firehose where you can find all of my latest shared items on AI on my GerdFeed blog (this is a search link — use the box on the right:), or browse my Twitter/X feed (try AI @gleonhard or #artificialintelligence @gleonhard).

For those of you who are in a hurry, here are some quick bottom lines on AI and the Future of Humanity:

1. For the foreseeable future, most of the really useful AI stuff is better categorised as IA (Intelligent Assistance i.e ‘smart software’, watch this video and this YT short) — which goes hand in hand with my next point:
2. Imho, for the next 3–5 years, it’s all about competence, not consciousness (short video) — I think we should seek to build machines (software and hardware aka digital entities) that can actually handle routine & commodity tasks for and on behalf of humans, rather than pursue the lofty and potentially quite dangerous goal of building generally intelligent machines (AGI), and:
3. Clearly, pursuing AGI is not something we should simply leave to commercial entities (see below) — this is a public safety and security issue. Watch this video about IA, AI and AGI.
4. Humans using AI will probably replace those who don’t — AI by itself will only replace humans that ‘work like a robot’ (Interview with me here)
5. For now, let’s use AI for things where failure is OK and where the inevitable hallucinations do not create existential risks — such as for translation, summarising, fact-checking and searching (again, the Rask.ai case study is a good example…and just for fun, check out these cool overdubs in Hindi)
6. Have a look at my CAVA explanation of the 4 components of Ai: Cognification, Augmentation, Virtualisation and Automation.

Here are my recommended reads on AI (and on exponential technologies in general)

The Five Questions You Should Ask when implementing AI (HBR): “Question to ask: Does your data have a source of truth? Many supervised machine learning algorithms try to distinguish categories of objects. To train them, you need data that is accurately labeled e.g. this person is a reasonable credit risk or a lousy one. This response to a customer inquiry helped while that one did not. Without a good source of truth, a complex multi-layer deep learning neural network may be no better than flipping a coin. Do you have enough well-labeled data? But without a sufficient starting point, humans may quickly grow weary of helping the novice AI bots who are supposed to be helping them instead….”

ChatGPT Is Turning the Internet Into Plumbing: What does life online look like filtered through a bot? By Damon Beres / The Atlantic “do AI-powered chatbots open new doors to learning and discovery, or do they instead risk siloing off information and leaving us stuck with unreliable access to truth…” (No paywall, archive.ph link)

The amazing Scott Galloway on AI Bubbles (Scott’s stuff rocks, in general . watch his 2024 OMR talk, here)

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It — A great public resource is at risk of being destroyed. By Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier / The Atlantic (Archive.ph link): “There are the obvious problems. LLMs occasionally get things wrong. They summarize and synthesize answers, frequently without pointing to sources. And the human creators — the people who produced all the material that the LLM digested in order to be able to produce those answers — are cut out of the interaction, meaning they lose out on audiences and compensation”

? Don’t Believe the AI Hype? May 21, 2024 DARON ACEMOGLU Project Syndicate: “For example, Goldman Sachs predicts that generative AI will boost global GDP by 7% over the next decade, and the McKinsey Global Institute anticipates that the annual GDP growth rate could increase by 3–4 percentage points between now and 2040…”

The 3 phases of AI evolution that could play out this century: Tech entrepreneur Alvin Wang Graylin sketches out a bold new age of AI-led enlightenment underscored by compassion. BigThink.

‘AI Platforms will Control What Everybody Sees,’ Says Meta’s AI Chief Yann LeCun: “Eventually all our interactions with the digital world will be mediated by AI assistants. This means that AI assistants will constitute a repository of all human knowledge and culture; they will constitute a shared infrastructure like the internet is today,” said Yann LeCun, one of the three godfathers of AI, in his talk at GenAI Winter School…”

And here are the best books I am currently reading (the entire list is here)

• The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI (Fei Fei Li) Kindle
• The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma Kindle Edition by Mustafa Suleyman (Author)

Btw: Your are receiving this email because you signed up for my newsletter on my website or on my book-sites. You can use the link below to unsubscribe anytime — and apologies for bothering you!

MY LATEST VIDEOS AND TALKS ON AI

Here are some links to blogposts featuring my recent AI-related speaking engagements:

• Doing well and doing good: My super-wide-screen, virtual keynote at the South African Investment Summit March 2024
• AI and the Future of Business: Keynote at Fortinet Monaco (2023)
• My keynote at Future Tense Croatia (includes PDF with executive summary) 2023

Embedded below are my top keynotes to watch on this mush-rooming topic. Quick note: you can use the chapter links in the descriptions on Youtube to quickly jump to the key topics, as you see fit.

About #thegoodfuture: how can technology, business, science be harnessed to create a positive future. I delve into the nature of exponential technology and the need for ethical frameworks and standards to guide its use. Highlighting the limitations of machines — such as the absence of compassion, common sense, ethical understanding — I emphasize the value of human agency

My keynote from the AIVolution event in Lisbon on May 29, 2024. I used a super-wide format for this event thus this recording is also much wider than 16:9.

CAVA: excerpt from my keynote at the Futurist of the Year conference in Warsaw (April 2024) on Education, Work and Jobs: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence. Amazing 180 degree LED screen:)

This is a new edit of my entire keynote at https://futuristoftheyear.com/en/home/ in Warsaw featuring a new intro and various sound / video improvements.Reminder: If you work like a robot, a robot will take your job.Below: Some recent stats and illustrations.. You may find them helpful

Gerd Leonhard: 3 revolutions transforming manufacturingTechnology alone will not be enough to achieve The Good Future.
We don’t just need great tools — we also need great telos (wisdom, collaboration, purpose)

Finally, here are other great tools I use for my work:

• Descript AI “If you can edit text, you can make videos. Descript is the AI-powered, fully featured, end-to-end video editor that you already know how to use….” (Example)
• Veed (great tool for simple video editing and special effects)
• Google Notebook LM — really powerful Knowledge Management tool (read Steven Johnson’s take here)