{"id":34865,"date":"2023-10-09T13:34:27","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T12:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/?p=34865"},"modified":"2023-10-13T09:49:15","modified_gmt":"2023-10-13T08:49:15","slug":"more-than-a-hammer-and-nails-approach-needed-for-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digileaders.com\/more-than-a-hammer-and-nails-approach-needed-for-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"More than a hammer and nails approach needed for AI?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently attended a fascinating roundtable on AI. It was a really interesting discussion, with many different perspectives, and it did get us all thinking that among the understandable hype, there is a risk of missing something crucial.<\/span><\/p>\n

The scale of growth of AI tooling is unlike anything I\u2019ve ever seen in my career. That\u2019s not just me saying it. Here\u2019s a slightly more authoritative viewpoint:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAI had roughly linear progress from 1960s-2010, then exponential 2010-2020s, then started to display \u2018compounding exponential\u2019 properties in 2021\/22 onwards.\u00a0 In other words, the next few years will yield progress that intuitively feels nuts.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Jack Clark, the Co-Chair of AI Index at Stanford University.<\/b><\/p>\n

Along with the technical progress, there is also a compounding exponential growth in the public inquisitiveness in AI. This explosion in interest has been fuelled first by ChatGPT, and now by other publicly available generative AI tools.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems to me that with this unprecedented growth, there is an understandable risk of us jumping towards AI solutions and trying to find justifications for their use.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

More than hammer and nails<\/span><\/h3>\n

Another quote for you\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail\u201d<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Abraham Maslow<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

A phrase I\u2019ve used for years without realising it is from Abraham Maslow (he of the \u201cHierarchy of Needs\u201d fame). A rush to adopt AI could actually create additional problems rather than address fundamental needs.<\/span><\/p>\n

The emergence of these tools is very exciting and offers real potential to accelerate change. But I worry that we run the risk of letting the solutions dictate the approach and obscure the very problems we need to solve. There are risks associated with this (and apologies in advance to both reader and Maslow for the abuse of the analogy):<\/span><\/p>\n