Are we prepared for the AI juggernaut?

 

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blue-bright-lights-373543/

Rising unemployment amongst Indian youth is one of the biggest challenges facing the nation and things have been compounded by the emergence of AI or Artificial Intelligence as an enabler of efficiency and cost reduction for businesses and organisations across the board.  According to an All India Management Association-PWC report 46% of decision makers/influencers believed that AI systems would severely impact the Indian employment scenario.[1]

But are Indian businesses really going all out to adopt AI, as all the hype surrounding its imminent dominance of all manner of industries would seem to suggest? Apparently not according to the Cisco 2024 readiness index which found that only 18% of Indian organisations are ready to comprehensively deploy AI, which is down from a more robust 26% merely a year ago.[2] While this may ring alarm bells among AI votaries in India about the country’s preparedness with regard to the coming AI blitzkrieg, it is also a sobering indicator about the fact that AI like any another technology will have to go beyond mere media build-up to actually show big bang for the buck for everyone to succumb 100% to its unproven charms.

Before we debate the efficacy of AI in industrial, business, social and practically every type of organization that exists in the world, we have to understand that the emergence of the technology is on account of the same free-wheeling capitalism that is leading to climate catastrophe threatening to end life as we know it on planet Earth. Ruthless and heartless efficiency are at the heart of AI technology with scant regard for the human beings who created these organisations for their own purposes. By prioritising organisations over human beings, AI may be striking at the root of human existence.

This is a philosophical question that needs answering, especially in a country like India with its still teeming millions, vast numbers of whom do not possess the skills that will gainfully employ them. If we think that unbridled AI is a necessary evil, as indeed more and more people believe that unbridled capitalism is proving to be, shouldn’t there be stringent regulation of it, much as there is of corporate organizations striving to become absolute monopolies?

AI has undoubtedly become the investors' and entrepreneurs' blue-eyed boy for want of a better expression for the almost colonialist attitude towards expecting untold riches to accrue to them in a trans-global AI paradise where only the gatekeepers of new-fangled technologies and their capitalist backers will find utopia, never mind the aspirations of the billions of other underprivileged souls. Already there is talk of the latter being mollified by a Universal Basic Income! 1984 and Matrix anyone.

To those who tout AI as the definitive technology that will help transform healthcare, the environment sector, education and everything else on God’s good Earth, it pays to remember that according to a report in The New Yorker, if Google decides to integrate Generative AI into every search that ever took place, the consequent power consumption would be 29 billion K Wh annually -more than what many small nations consume.[3] Just what the doctor ordered for a sick and climate-change-afflicted world!

In fact, the very debate about the AI revolution delivering the world seems far-fetched and facetious in a world wracked by wars, epidemics, catastrophic floods, forest fires, multiple refugee crises, impending trade wars ethnic conflicts and global trade wars. Viewed against what’s going on in this world of ours at any given time, any fiery debate about how AI promises to transform the world is a bit of a joke. The human condition may have improved since the days of cave dwellers, but only that much. Human nature has so far ensured that there is no inexorable march towards utopia or nirvana that ensures peaceful and happy coexistence for all. AI promises to step up to the chase and help us achieve just that. We shall see.

 

 

 

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[1] https://www.pwc.in/assets/pdfs/publications/2018/how-ai-is-reshaping-jobs-in-india.pdf

[2] https://www.theweek.in/news/sci-tech/2024/11/12/ai-readiness-declines-in-india-only-18-firms-fully-prepared-to-deploy-ai-powered-technologies.html

[3] https://www.expresscomputer.in/artificial-intelligence-ai/ai-ai-everywhere-but-are-we-truly-prepared/116699/

Why you should never use ChatGPT for writing

 

Photo by Matheus Bertelli: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-using-laptop-wit-chat-gpt-16094040/

For all the noise about how wonderful ChatGPT is for relegating all your writing to it and the fact that businesses, individuals, researchers, students et al are doing just that, it is the dumbest thing one can resort to. For all that ChatGPT and other similar Generative AI tools do is to regurgitate past content and present it as new. The obvious danger in this is that these will soon enough start regurgitating, the mountainous amounts of AI-created content in cyberspace.

The best parallel that one can draw is with a primitive civilization that has been gifted with a machine that is able to bake cakes if fed with the right kind of ingredients, making the natives forget how to bake cakes themselves. Once the machine breaks down, they are unable to make cake anymore, as they have forgotten how to. For all those singing hosannas to ChatGPT, just wait a few years and the AI-created drivel will drive everybody nuts.

Generating content using AI crimps a person’s ability to think critically and, therefore, learn. Imagine, how harmful it is for students who more than anyone else need to be able to think critically so as to be able to understand concepts better. All that ChatGPT will teach them is to become prompting experts. That is a very limited use of the human brain’s muscles. Just because we possess automobile technology, have we forbidden our children from learning to walk?

No matter how good one might be at prompting Generative AI tools to create content for us, one is never totally confident of the accuracy of the output. This can wreak havoc when one is engaged in carrying out high-end academic research.  The very term Generative AI is a misnomer because intelligence denotes the presence of a brain, which is substituted by an aggregator and narrator of information gleaned from here and there.

Writing recalls, relates and shapes the lived human experience. It cannot be left to machines. They can only replicate and simulate what human thought might be. If tomorrow there is sentient AI, perhaps it will be able to write about its ‘lived’ experience, which will be uniquely its own! We won’t be able to do that very effectively for it, as we are not AI, but physical beings with a carbon-based body.

Creditable publications and increasingly many businesses deploying content marketing tactics are making it clear that ChatGPT-generated content is not kosher. It is liable to invite the wrath of the readers who take it to be human-created content and find out it is a machine without feelings or emotions that is fooling them with contrived content that is often plain wrong and ill-informed. Writing and the feelings it evokes are very personal things and just as it is inconceivable that one can marry a machine or a virtual being, it is ludicrous that ChatGPT should attempt to create literature.

Solopreneurship is mainstream and how

Photo by Kuncheek: https://www.pexels.com/photo/accountant-counting-money-210990/

 Solopreneurship is the flavour of the times, thanks to the technology revolution sweeping the world.  Ostensibly, run solely by one person who is the owner and manages everything from operations to publicity and sales, it can pretty much operate at scale much like a regular company, partnership or sole proprietorship employing many people to carry out diverse functions. Ever new developments in technology have made it possible for such businesses to run cheaply and efficiently allowing them to grow and prosper.

Why become a solopreneur?

There are compelling reasons to become a solopreneur in today’s day and age and that is something that hasn’t been lost on people. In fact, solopreneurs accounted for 84% of American businesses as far back as 2020, a figure which is bound to be higher in 2024.[1] In India 22% of the unicorns that came up in the last decade started as solopreneur endeavours.[2]

Let us look at the reasons driving the surge in the number of people choosing to become solopreneurs-

Potentially limitless earning potential

If you find a lucrative niche to operate in, there is potentially limitless potential to earn, depending upon how ambitious you are and how hard you are willing to achieve those ambitions. There is no petty office politics or grave corporate intrigue to hamper your progress and you don’t have to anxiously await your performance appraisal for a less than satisfactory raise.

Looking beyond corporate life

A successful corporate life may long have been considered the pinnacle of achievement, but that is no longer the case, especially in the post-Covid scenario. People have come to realise that there is much more to life than spending every waking minute relentlessly pursuing someone else’s business goals and paying a very heavy price in terms of one’s personal well-being.

Add to that the ever-present spectre of loss of employment and the charm of the 9 to 5 routine begins to wear off quickly. People crave a work-life balance more than ever before and solopreneurship offers them just that.

The growing use of technology

The growing use of technology, especially AI has enabled solopreneurs to scale up and enhance efficiency and productivity to the enterprise level, allowing them to grow in an exponential manner. This levelling of the playing field has convinced large numbers of enterprising and ambitious people to go along the solopreneur path, often with spectacular results.

Industries Amenable to Solopreneurship

There is a whole host of industries that see a fair amount of solopreneurship activity. These include-

-Content Creation

-Digital Marketing

-E-Commerce

-Wellness

-Legal Services

-Coaching

-Consulting

-Technology (including software development)

-Creative Art

-Designing

-Real Estate

-Finance

-Accounting

-Personal Services

-Education

-Engineering Services

-Travel

-Hospitality

Do it now!

If you always felt the urge to strike out on your own and break free of the shackles of corporate slavery, but dithered and hesitated for one reason or the other, there isn’t a better time than now to take that leap of faith and carve out your own destiny. There is more chance of your finding success than there ever was in the history of mankind. Follow in the footsteps of millions of others who made it as solopreneurs, forever earning their living on their own terms.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2024/07/21/entering-the-era-of-the-solopreneur/

[2] https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/last-decade-only-22-of-unicorns-were-started-by-solopreneurs-report/article68023643.ece

Is Digital Marketing Over-Hyped?

 

Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gray-and-black-laptop-computer-265087/

In an era where businesses that haven’t at least partly gone digital are looked at as relics from the Jurassic age, can one question the efficacy of digital marketing as an important means of growing a business? With a gargantuan industry size of $780 billion, can you blame them for thinking like that? [1]With the daily number of hours spent going online via one’s phones ranging between 4 and 6 hours worldwide, can it really be otherwise?

The surging popularity of digital marketing as evidenced by its huge industry size is certainly a validation of its effectiveness. Still, just because that is the case, it does not mean we can’t have doubts about it or not subject it to greater scrutiny. Unbridled and unchecked enthusiasm for any trend can lead to unmitigated disasters as the Dot Com bubble and the subprime crisis showed us not all that long ago.

The thing to consider here is that digital marketing is one part of the marketing exercise and not the whole of it as it seems to have become. You can also market digitally and not just market digitally. There is a distinction between the two and this should not be forgotten. Just getting a discussion going about a brand online does not make it a hit or a success. There is so much more that determines a brand or business’s success than SEO and social media chatter.

Every year one hears of new-fangled technologies like VR, AR, Metaverse, NFT and, of course, everyone’s current favourite Generative AI. More than anything else, these technologies raise marketing budgets, more than the ROI. Marketing has to be in the now and present which is the hallmark of traditional forms of marketing, not digital marketing, which is forever toying with new seemingly path-breaking ideas.

A Case for Traditional Marketing

There is much that is good about traditional marketing. From credibility and flexible outreach to ease of implementation and the ability to target an older audience, it retains its ability to give digital marketing a run for its money and in many cases outperform it. Besides, it may work out cheaper in some cases considering the cost of going digital including the money spent on training and familiarizing oneself with the digital way of doing digital marketing.  

Overall, of course, digital marketing is known to be a lot cheaper and provides marketers the wherewithal to reach out far and wide without breaking the bank. Besides, its results can be tracked and tabulated better and sooner. That is the reason why it has seen such growth. But to jettison traditional marketing altogether for digital marketing would be a foolhardy move.

[1] https://www.marknteladvisors.com/research-library/digital-marketing-market.html#:~:text=The%20Global%20Digital%20Marketing%20Market,%2C%20i.e.%2C%202024%2D30.

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