Artificial Intelligence is by no means a new thing, so in some respects it’s surprising that it has captured so much media attention and contributed so much to the returns for U.S. Technology stocks since Chat GPT was launched last fall. For some context, Google formally launched its AI platform at its I/O summit in 2017, and IBM launched its Watson AI platform in 2010, a follow on to their “Deep Blue” which famously beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov all the way back in 1997. But the markets have seized on this as the next big thing, and certainly, it has already had an immediate positive impact on the earnings generated by the cloud’s value chain, all the way from semi-conductor companies to the software giants powering the cloud.

 

Let’s face it, at face value, the concept of AI is unsettling. At best, it should be disruptive as jobs re-align to the new reality. Darker minds will conjure up images of Sarah Connor walking through a bombed out future landscape in the Terminator franchise, or Neo taking a red pill and waking up from his living dream inside the Matrix. But this is not a foregone conclusion.

 

Steven Pinker is a Canadian born Professor of Psychology at Harvard University who has published prolifically on cognition, language and machine intelligence. Back in 2018, he engaged in a public debate with Elon Musk about the risks of “general AI” when compared to the “functional / narrow AI. Later that year, Steven Pinker was hosted by Lex Fridman, who hosts a regular podcast on AI, and talked about humankind’s “overall negativity bias” (we dread losses more than we seek gains) when weighing the notional threats posed by AI with the very real threats posed by climate change, car accidents, cyber-attacks and other forms of war. While we don’t agree with all his conclusions, it’s worth a listen, not least to establish how the risks and rewards of AI have been part of the public discourse long before ChatGPT emerged on the scene, but also to reflect on how we allocate resources, financial and otherwise, to address real risks with a high probability of occurring versus notional risks with a possibility of occurring. It’s available online here, or on Spotify or Apple podcasts.

 

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