Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks
“IT’S AS THOUGH THE ALBANIAN ARMY WAS GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD”
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
INTRODUCTION
Where better to learn about the potential and the pitfalls of AI than at MIT! I was thrilled to join the program as part of the opening panel, “GenAI: Disruptive Innovation or Paradigm Change?” This Thought Spark captures some things I thought were surprising, depressing, exciting or all of the above. The quote in the title comes from Andrew McAfee, author of “The Geek Way” and closing keynote speaker. He recalls the head of a legacy TV company saying that about Netflix in 2010. Well, House of Cards debuted in 2013 and the traditional media company has practically disappeared, while Netflix continues to thrive.
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
Sendhil Mullainathan, a Professor of Computer Science and Economics told a fascinating story about a great mystery surrounding the “Wizard of Oz” books. L. Frank Baum, the originator of the series, wrote many more books after his 1900 runaway success, but passed away in the midst of book #15. That happened in 1919. How many of you knew there were something like 40 “Oz” books in the series?
AI CAN SETTLE ARGUMENTS HUMANS HAVE
BEEN DEBATING FOR YEARS
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
WHY AI MIGHT HELP HUMANS DO A “FILM
REVIEW” IN OTHER PARTS OF THEIR LIVES
Another AI study that Sendhil noted was that of predicting which people encountering the criminal justice system, pre-trial, would be allowed to go home by judges or required to be placed into prison. The model churned through all kinds of factual data and came to the conclusion that the most predictive thing of all is the mug shot. If you are well-groomed, you ’ re less likely to go to jail.
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
My good friend Vala Afshar, who is the Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce, suggests that AI increasingly will not only help us do stuff, but potentially do stuff for us. This creates the fascinating prospect that we ’ re starting to look at purely digital employees – in fact he predicts that by next year companies will be deploying over a billion active agents who can cut through corporate silos, figure out where companies are generating waste and leverage corporate capabilities in ways that have not been seen before.
WASTE REDUCTION, AI
“EMPLOYEES”
AND AI
“COLLEAGUES”
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
THE LAUNCH OF “CONNECTEDNESS”
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Thinkers50 / Wiley book of essays on human connection was launched at the event. It’s a charming collective effort by several of the Thinkers50 and Silicon Guild authors and delves into topics of how we can create connections in a world that is increasingly digitally intermediated. We had a fun little book signing! Oh, and I was delighted to have written the foreword.
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
ANDY
MCAFEE AND THE WHOLE US ECONOMY IN A FEW CHARTS
The conference’s final keynote was led by Andy McAfee, a legend in the world of digitization and AI. In his view, AI is going to create an even wider competitiveness chasm between firms that ‘get it’ and those that don’t. He took a time period snapshot of publicly traded firms in the US economy and found that between 1930 and 1990 there wasn’t much change in the composition of firms in terms of how much value they represented in the marketplace.
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
RitaMcGrath | Thought Sparks
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