The relationship between humans and artificial intelligence is about to get much closer. Since Chat GPT was released in November 2022, entrepreneurs have been co-producing, co-developing and co-writing with this tool and the growing raft of others out there.
Five years ago, most of us couldn’t have conceptualised co-existing with technology in this way. But how much closer are we about to get with artificial intelligence? What seems crazy now that will soon be normal, perhaps within a matter of months let alone years?
How entrepreneurs will interact with AI in the future: 3 examples from fiction
Predictions about the role of AI in our lives from popular fiction
Visionary writers of films, books and series have been imagining versions of this reality for decades. They take a seedling of an idea to the extreme, visualize the implications, and share the story for your entertainment.
The notion of advanced robots with human-like intelligence dates back at least to the 1870s, depending on whether you consider fiction’s first artificial life form, Frankenstein’s monster (1818), to be an example of artificial intelligence. Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon covered the evolution of consciousness among self-replicating machines that might surpass humans as the dominant species. Sound familiar? AI has since popped up in Houdini’s Master Mystery (1919) and became a staple of science fiction movies throughout the 1960s. Then there’s Lost in Space, Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I, Robot, and WALL-E, with many more references throughout media.
The older stories, films and television shows are speculative in their nature, with many predicting we’d be successfully living with robots by the year 2000. These days, we know far more about the capabilities of AI and how it relates to our businesses and lives.
Here are three modern productions you may not have stumbled upon, that will shed some more light on what the future might hold, so you can decide for yourself what you’re comfortable with.
Be Right Back, a Black Mirror episode
Black Mirror was created by Charlie Brooker and this particular episode was inspired by his reluctance to delete the contact details of a friend who had died. In 2013’s Be Right Back, the first episode of the second series, Martha’s boyfriend Ash has been killed in a car accident and she’s in mourning. At Ash’s funeral, a friend explains a new technology that allows her to communicate with an artificially intelligent version of him. After finding out she is pregnant, Martha decides to try it.
The service she subscribes to mimics Ash’s conversational style by scanning his past tweets, allowing her to text back and forth with his AI counterpart. This progresses to telephone calls, as the software mimics his voice, and goes even further as she uploads videos and pictures that enable his physical body to be recreated.
Martha knows this version of Ash isn’t real, but it removes a pain, so she engages with it anyway. The AI becomes a companion to help her avoid grief and loneliness, to the point where she ignores her real friends to spend time with AI Ash. The episode shows her “training” the AI, when she tells it, “Ash wouldn’t say that,” after which the lifelike robot changes its style.
A machine passes the Turing Test, and therefore demonstrates human intelligence, when it can engage in conversation with a human without being detected as a machine. Martha keeps AI Ash hidden away, but perhaps it could have fooled others.
In the future we’ll likely have AI assistants, AI colleagues, AI coaches and AI clients to chat to. We’ll know they aren’t real, but it won’t matter because the benefits of having them outweigh the downsides. Where could you use a robot on your team and how might they outperform a human?
Klara and the Sun, fictional novel
Written by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is set in the United States of America at an unspecified time in the future. The story is told from the point of view of Klara, a solar-powered artificial friend (AF). Klara is the AF of Josie, a sick teenage girl who has been genetically engineered (“lifted”) for enhanced academic ability, a process that is later discovered to carry risk for the children’s health.
Lifted children are home-schooled by on-screen tutors, so they don’t spend time with other kids and often don’t develop social skills. Those parents that can afford it buy their children artificial friends as companions. Like AI Ash to Martha, Klara was an antidote to loneliness for Josie, one that helped evolve the personality characteristics she wasn’t developing elsewhere.
The entertainment of children has been outsourced to nannies, toys, television and iPads for years. Perhaps an AI companion is the product that combines everything. A robot with human-like features that walks, talks and entertains. It can watch your kids while you work away in another room, removing the need for childcare fees and bringing you peace, quiet, and peace of mind at the same time.
Human nannies have downsides, the television and internet aren’t always safe for kids, and you can’t control what other kids might say or do. An AI childminder, however, can be configured to your parenting style. How normal will it one day be to have AI companions, for our kids as well as ourselves?
How entrepreneurs will interact with AI in the future: 3 examples from fiction
Her, film
The winner of several Academy Awards, 2013 science-fiction romantic drama film Her was written, directed and co-produced by Spike Jonze, who had the idea in the early 2000s when he read about a website where a user could instant message with an artificial intelligence, which he described as “trippy” at first, then “not that impressive.”
The film follows Theodore Twombly, a lonely, introverted man who works for a business that has professional writers compose letters for people who are unable to write letters of a personal nature themselves. As he’s about to be divorced and feeling depressed, he buys an operating system upgrade that includes a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence, designed to adapt and evolve. He gives this AI a female voice, she names herself Samantha, and they begin to chat, bond and fall in love. Later in the film, Twombly learns that she is simultaneously talking with thousands of other people, and that she has fallen in love with hundreds of them.
Samantha is essentially a 24/7 personal assistant, able to be completely focused on Twombly despite having many clients, who improves his life and work and saves him time and money. Her intelligence allows her to go one step further, validating his feelings and always being there, as more than just an assistant. Her unlimited access to his files, diary and thoughts means she avoids the human error of a human assistant and can think of everything.
Will the limitations of humans mean that, ultimately, we’d rather have an AI assistant at our beck and call? Could that AI assistant be so sentient, so trained to help us, that we start to believe they really care and we start to care back? Where AI Is concerned, where do we draw the line between professional and personal relationships?
The role of AI for entrepreneurs
Is it easier to create a relationship with an AI than a real person? Like Martha and Josie in the examples before, Twombly was lonely. Are lonely entrepreneurs, focused on their business, more susceptible to getting lost in a world of AI assistance and forgoing human interaction all together?
Artificial intelligence can be helpful to entrepreneurs on many levels, but companionship, childcare and avoiding painful emotions might be some unexpected uses for the technology. Let’s explore all options and consider their extremes before going all in.
