A 2022 survey by market research firm Ipsos for the World Economic Forum found that 60% of adults globally believe AI-driven products and services will drastically reshape their daily lives.
As Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford Digital Economy Lab. attests, "AI is a transformative technology that will have a bigger impact than just about any earlier wave of technology up to and including the internet.
"It's really hard to think of any industry that won't be affected."
But AI's omnipresence can also be a double-edged sword, presenting both remarkable opportunities and significant ethical challenges.
AI's relentless advances are pushing boundaries of human cognition and capability, igniting debates about whether machines might one day surpass human intelligence and develop emotional understanding, compelling us to grapple with implications of a future in which AI is not merely a tool, but a powerful force capable of turning the world upside down.
Barry Chudakov, principal at Sertain Research, projects that "The embedding of AI will be both a convenience and a point of contention as we enhance our lives with it and entwine our lives with its hidden presence, which will create a tech-paranoia backlash as jobs are lost to AI and the digital divide widens."
Take that allegedly unique human realm of psychological intelligence, for example, where AI is offering powerful tools to navigate and influence emotional landscapes by political and business marketing promoters.
A Cogito tool provides immediate behavioral feedback utilizing sophisticated machine learning algorithms to detect stress, confusion and engagement, then provides insights to improve interpersonal interactions by customer service representatives.
Affectiva, a tool used by many of the world’s largest advertisers, focuses on facial recognition for emotional analysis, drawing upon a database encompassing evaluation of more than 80,000 advertisements and facial expressions of more than 14.7 million individuals involving more than 30 facial indicators.
Or maybe you imagined that planning of most high-profile marketing campaigns and creation of sophisticated advertising materials will remain as exclusive domains of highly trained professionals?
Companies like Luman 5 and Raw Shorts have developed user-friendly tools to allow anyone to rapidly create high quality content, including narrated videos with animation and music from simple text scripts.
Luman 5 generates a storyboard, selects relevant media and flow that enhances narrative. More than one million users including major brands like Siemens and the World Health Organization have created videos . . . more than 10 million creations.
Raw Shorts goes a step farther by providing a vast library of customizable templates and assets allowing users to tweak videos to perfection.
But what about art and music, is AI capable of matching human "creativity," or is that somewhat derivative as well?
Some art "authorities" apparently believe so.
Perhaps consider that an AI portrait of Edmond de Balmy created by AI art collective Obvious which analyzed thousands of portraits to generate a unique image using a "generative adversarial network" (GAN) sold at a Christie auction for $432,500.
An Art Breeders tool enables users to create unique pieces of art by merging, mixing and matching characteristic artistic content and styles together to create unique images from multiple human sources without their awareness or approval.
Similarly applying this AI mixed content breeding capability, AVIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Arts) draws upon a vast dataset of sources to compose original music in minutes including compilations that mimic styles of great composers like Mozart and Beethoven.
If you don't understand a foreign language, Waverly Labs and their Ambassador ear buds offer real-time translation in 20 different languages and 42 regional dialects with state-of-art audio enrichment whereby other distracting voices and surrounding noise fade away.
There can be no doubt that remarkable AI capabilities are enhancing while transforming and perhaps also adding higher intellectual human function roles as well as replacing them.
Technology research company Gartner lists four key cases where generative AI will have greatest impact: content generation (images and language); content discovery (search functions and contextual relevance); conversational assistance (summarization and translation); and simulations (strategic planning and predictions).
In the field of medicine, for example, AI assists doctors by analyzing medical images, predicting patient outcomes, and providing treatment recommendations with improved diagnostic accuracy and overall patient care.
Applied to finance, AI algorithms can quickly detect fraudulent activities, conduct automated trading, offer personalized financial advice, and help professionals make more informed decisions.
Bob Sternfels, global managing partner of McKinsey, a leading corporate advisory firm that has helped generations of CEOs navigate complex strategic planning decisions, emphasizes that AI is fundamentally changing the ways it works with clients, how it hires, and even what projects it takes on to do next.
An August Wall Street Journal article authored by Chip Culter relevantly asks, "If AI can crunch numbers, analyze data and deliver a slick PowerPoint deck in two seconds, what will a consulting firm do to survive?"
Catalant CEO Pat Petitti points out that junior employees will likely be affected most immediately since fewer of them will be needed to do rote tasks on big projects, with slimmer staffing expected to ripple through the entire consulting food chain.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang advises that while every job will unquestionably be touched by generative AI in some way, the best personal career strategy is to embrace it and adapt.
As Jensen told audiences at a May Milken Institute Global Conference, "You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI."
Having an advanced degree — once considered a surefire path to career advancement — is no longer a safeguard against sinking in these rapidly changing AI tides.
(Editor's Note: The preceding opinion column is not an endorsement of any product or service on the part of Newsmax.)
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.