As 2024 gets underway, with pretty much the same worries and concerns that we ended 2023 with – since troubles don’t always pay that close attention to the human calendar – you would be pardoned for wondering if the AI hype will continue in 2024 at the same torrid pace as last year.  Will AI be a golden ticket for speakers granting them access to full employment?  Will every conference and every talk feel the need to have at least one AI segment?  Should you switch your life’s work from leadership to AI, go back to school for a PhD in AI studies, and re-launch X years from now into a completely different market?

The answer to that last question is no, bad idea, for a host of reasons, but we can certainly pause for a minute to let you rue your life choices.  I’ll join you.  I’m also not an AI expert, so any opinions expressed below are solely what I’ve been able to glean from watching the experts over the years — from an appropriate distance.  Any mistakes in predicting the future are mine alone.

I’m going to offer three perspectives on AI for speakers, in order to begin the process of trying to make sense of it and what role it might play in our public speaking future.  First, if you were one of the smart and lucky ones who already has studied AI and actually knows something about it, then what are you waiting for?  Get out there, start speaking, and ride that expertise wave into a well-funded sunset.

Second, for everyone else, a bit of perspective.  I was lucky enough to hang out with experts in IT and AI just over 20 years ago, when the battle lines were being drawn.  There were two schools of thought, then, and two bets to make.  The first was what was called expert systems, and the idea was to take a fairly narrow field of expertise, like tax law, or a medical specialty, and encode the rules for that domain into a system that could potentially one day replace the experts, or at least enhance them.

The second focused on training a computer to think like a human being, capable of responding to new situations with novel thought processes based on knowing something about the world, probabilities, and how humans think about the world around them. The phrase “neural nets” was bandied about a good deal, and whenever it was I thought of William Gibson.

The first school made rapid progress and was able to mimic experts pretty well in relatively short order in computer years.  A few parsecs ago, for example, an AI system was able to surpass a human doctor in accuracy detecting the presence of cancer in x-rays.  It’s now the case that, if you’re in the unfortunate position of needing one of those, you are better off getting a smart system to check your x-ray than a human doctor. Or maybe demand both — one to check the other.

The other school mostly discovered how hard it was to train a set of bits and bytes to think like a human.  They made only slow progress until big data sets became available, but we’re still nowhere near Hal or The Singularity.

ChatGPT is more like the former than the latter.  It’s a language prediction machine.  Having been fed enormous amounts of words, it predicts what the likely order of words (from the set that it has digested) would be in a response.  It’s not thinking like humans, it’s thinking statistically.  We’re still waiting for machines that can think like humans do in novel situations.

Finally, when you stand back far enough, you can see the waves of technological progress that the tech world makes, from the Internet, to the smart phone and apps, to the Cloud, to big data, to ChatGPT and AI.  Each wave brings absurd amounts of hype in the short run, and then much, much slower adoption by the business, education, and political worlds over a longer period of time.  That cycle may be getting shorter, or perhaps the innovations are less mind-blowing.  Hard to say.  As Bill Gates noted, humanity overestimates the amount of change a technological development will bring in the short run and underestimates the change in the long run.  So, if you didn’t get a degree in AI, don’t despair.  Stick to your lane and keep investing in yourself for the long run.  You’ll do better than the lane-switchers ever will, even if it takes a longer time.