This post was originally published on this site.
For roughly an hour, artificial intelligence futurist Zack Kass parsed the possibilities of a new frontier in the human experience with the assistance of AI — a technology that terrifies some and inspires others.
Kass brought his vast knowledge of artificial intelligence, along with trends and predictions for AI, as the keynote speaker for the 11th annual Power Forward Speaker Series. The event was presented by First Commerce Credit Union and the Florida State University Office of Research Development.
He challenged the audience to think about how, for most of human history, technological thresholds and societal thresholds moved in tandem, adding “it was a perfect convergence.”
“We used to invent things out of absolute necessity. Discovered fire. We light everything on fire. Invent a hammer. Everything looks like a nail, right?,” said Kass, former head of Go to Market for OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.
“What’s interesting, though,” he continued, “is it does make this new question, which is, ‘Is the future actually determined by what machines can do or is it determined by what we want them to do?'”
Kass talked about AI’s impact on jobs and noted that technology has long reshaped the workforce. In addition, he talked about the fear factor associated with the little known and unknown.
He offered examples of innovation that, at one time, sparked fear and doubt in consumers. One example was the elevator. The first iteration was plagued with safety challenges, prompting necessary adjustments.
“They’ve solved the technological threshold. They’ve built a machine that is empirically safe, that moves people up and down without material risk,” Kass said. “But, they haven’t convinced them they should ride them. So they have not met the societal threshold.”
Kass said three steps were implemented to ease angst: add mirrors on the walls, then music and a human elevator operator. Even though operators had little functional purpose for the elevator’s mechanics, it worked.
“They put a physical person in the elevator to convince people that there was a human in control,” Kass said. “It was a reminder, a constant reminder, that someone’s job was to manage this machine and they had not yet died.”
“If you sit with it long enough, it begs the next question, which is the obvious one: what’s our elevator?,” Kass continued. “And, we have a ton.”
He likened the elevator analogy to the use of autonomous vehicles. Despite thousands of fatal crashes involving vehicles driven by humans, Kass said there’s deep trepidation by some people and a full embrace by others.
While Kass touched on a litany of uses for AI’s use today and into the future, he stressed the importance of human connection and the value of compassion, empathy and other emotions that can’t be duplicated by AI.
“We are going to have a ton of decisions to make, and it’s not going to be left to the scientist. It’s going to be left to society,” Kass said. “Where and how do we want machines to impact our lives? And one of the things that I advocate for … the reason I talked about how beautiful this space was when I walked in … is because there are plenty of societal thresholds that we should probably never cross.”
Contact Economic Development Reporter TaMaryn Waters at tlwaters@tallahassee.com and follow @TaMarynWaters on X.