Facing the future
Words Milly Nolan
AI Consultant, futurist, marketer, and founder of Ten Past Tomorrow, Mark Laurence, is telling anyone that is concerned about what Artificial Intelligence may mean to them personally or in business to ‘embrace it, don’t fear it’.
Point Wells local, Mark Laurence, first heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI – the simulation of human intelligence in machines) technology nearly a decade ago when he was working in a marketing agency. It was three years ago, however, when he started studying futurism through the Institute for the Future, that he started taking it seriously. “Futurism is about understanding the factors that are going to affect our future, and so obviously artificial intelligence is a big part of that,” says Mark.
Mark’s consultancy, Ten Past Tomorrow, was created on the premise that AI is going to transform the global economy and affect every business and industry. “When ChatGPT burst into our lives, suddenly AI became tangible to everyone,” says Mark. “Before ChatGPT, if I ever mentioned the word ‘artificial intelligence’, people would just roll their eyes at me. Now it feels very real, and since ChatGPT’s launch there’s been a lot of hype, questions, confusion and fear about what artificial intelligence means for our future. My job as an AI Consultant is to answer those questions and dispel the fear.”
Developed by OpenAI (an artificial intelligence research lab and technology company), ChatGPT is an AI tool designed to generate human-like text responses to prompts or questions from users. Trained on a vast amount of internet text data, it can be used for answering questions, drafting emails, writing code, engaging in conversation, providing explanations, and much, much more. According to Mark, what is fascinating about ChatGPT is that for the past decade, the futurist’s predictions were that AI (through the likes of robots and other advanced technologies) would affect manual labour and low-skilled jobs the most. However, generative AI is now seen as more of a threat to the likes of creatives such as writers, designers and visual artists, and website developers, as well as knowledge- based careers such as accountants and lawyers.
“I think the worst thing that anyone can do at this stage is to put their head in the sand,” says Mark. “AI is not going anywhere, it’s here to stay, so it needs to be embraced. ChatGPT is just one AI tool in a very large toolbox. What we've got at the moment is incredibly powerful, but it’s also the ‘dumbest’ version of AI that we are ever going to have – it’s just getting smarter and smarter, quicker and quicker. Artificial Intelligence isn't going to take your job, but a human using AI might.”
As an AI Consultant, Mark’s intention is to help businesses understand the generative AI landscape: how it applies to their business, what the benefits, risks and ethical implications are, and also to help educate their staff, and then to successfully implement generative AI into their operations and processes. “I think the beauty of AI and what it will do for us as humans – if it's deployed correctly – is that it can take out the parts of your job that you don't like,” says Mark. “Anything that's manual, repetitive, boring drudgery, AI might remove that part of your job. I'm interested in helping businesses increase their productivity two or three times, by offloading the stuff that AI can do for them instead. It’s not about culling jobs, it’s about helping businesses become more productive and produce more revenue with jobs that are more satisfying for their employees.”
Predicted to shake up the world more than the introduction of the internet did, while generative AI has some massive upsides to it, there’s no denying that there are also real risks. “Sure, there are parts of it that scare me,” says Mark, “but if we all talk about it openly, we've got a better chance of understanding it collectively. Don’t be caught flat-footed; tomorrow is already here. In fact, it's ten past tomorrow, and time for action.”