Do-It-Yourself economic downturn

You may be wondering how AI can benefit your day-to-day business activity.AI for the home use (like Siri and Alexa) is pretty obvious. These AI driven applications learn from you, what you like, what you may be looking for, learning your intonation and voice patterns — all to better “serve” your desires. But when it come to actual business activity, how is AI driven programming helpful?

The truth is, Artificial Intelligence is nothing of the sort. There is no intelligence here, beyond the genius of the programmers who wrote the code. AI is, simply, a non-human giant listening-sorting-measuring tool. Yes, AI programs can access the vastness of the internet for more information, but that’s no more than Google does for you, only quicker. What is different is that when you — and you are the key here — decide to ask AI to act on your behalf and determine what it is you are looking for or want to do, that program uses the learning, input of data you have supplied or that the AI can access from your social media, your internet browsing, your work activity, and whatever it is that you have rejected (yes, what you do not want or canceled is part of that data base) — then AI can seemingly act as your butler, your assistant, your dog’s body.

So, yes, if you write a letter and ask AI to rewrite it as if your are a PhD in literature, AI can work away and fashion a letter to suit your desires. And if you want to sell your small-business product, let’s say mops, you can input everything about your business, costs, delivery times, etc. as well as what you feel are the typical customers and AI will formulate a marketing plan based on internet cloud theft of other similar plans it can access. The selling feature of the AI purveyors like Google and Microsoft and others is that AI will do this quickly and will offer better market penetration for your product. Why? Simply because their AI programs are unconstrained by ethics.

Now, you may say, who cares if MS or Google are immoral as long as you get the benefit. And in a sense, that complicity on your part — which is not regulated as law-breaking by you — is a freebee. The problem you have is once your mops are selling, your competitor can access the cloud with their AI and it will rip your plans off — again without breaking any laws.

And there is one more thing to consider… like that AI powered robot painting cars, perfectly, every time, replacing tens of thousands of workers, in a very short while your business cannot survive competition without AI. In short your job, your very existence, is to use AI, again and again and again, always updating your business activity, just to stay where you are in the first place. And your profit will diminish as the cost of AI cripples your business net profit. Sure, initially AI can give you a boost, but once your business is addicted to using AI, there is no escape.

And you wonder why Microsoft, driven by AI sales, now tops $4,000,000,000,000 in value along with Nvidia, Apple, etc. In short, you’ll be working for them.

Peter Riva, a former resident of Amenia Union, New York, now lives in Gila, New Mexico.