64 OVER THE TOP Artificial Intelligence
Words by Neal Romanek DO SPAMBOTS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PHISHING? Artificial intelligence is going to enter every area of our lives – and totally disrupt our industry. How will you adapt?
I is definitely this year’s big buzz- acronym. And just as the discovery of simple machines – the lever, the pulley, the inclined plane – were
In short, the Age of Robots is going to be a mixed bag. We shouldn’t assume that the AI-saturated media industry of 2028 will be a linear extrapolation of our present ecosystem. It’s almost certain that AI will itself force alterations in the way we work – what workflows we use, how we use data, how we shoot and produce, even how we develop and write content. We are embarking on an age where AIs will eventually be partners with us. Right now artificial intelligence is in the position of a newly hired runner, who will get promoted based on how quickly he can fetch the coffee. In ten years, that AI is going to know much more about the company than we do, and it will be us asking it what we should do next, what our business strategy is, what project we should work next on - and how it likes its coffee. There will still be some analogue-centric companies that will produce high-end, quality services. They will be artisanal production companies – with content written, performed, shot, edited and financed by humans. Artisanal production
will go in and out of fashion, according to what’s popular (some of them may shoot on film or use motioin capture by real humans). But the simple, brutal laws of our economy – in the way we are currently opting to operate it – will mean that the vast majority of what we watch on the screen will be created out of an AI ecosystem. When we watch the screens, we’ll essentially be watching a lot of work done by AIs in which humans might play a high visibility – some of the time – role. Can you believe the iPhone is only 11 years old (the same age as Netflix’s streaming service)? The iPhone essentially launched from a standing start – it took networks and connectivity time to catch up to everything the iPhone could deliver. But now communication networks have matured and, for all practical purposes, we can send and receive any amount of data anywhere anytime. This new superfluidity of data means that transformation in digital
universally adopted and became the literal foundations of our whole civilisation, it’s looking like we may be at a place where new intelligent, digital machines are going to form the foundations of an entirely new one. It’s a naïve, but common, assumption to say that technological evolution equals progress. More efficient and powerful tools don’t automatically make our lives – or our businesses – better or more profitable. Sometimes they do. But sometimes they end up putting us out of business, or giving tremendous benefit to a select few. Sometimes they disrupt painfully, and it takes a generation or two or three for the culture to develop the skills to handle them. How disruption occurs has become an area of academic study. The Harvard Business Review has written extensively on disruption. In a 2015 article, What is disruptive innovation? (https://hbr.org/2015/12/ what-is-disruptive-innovation), Clayton M Christensen, Michael E Raynor and Rory McDonald point out the non-linear effects of disruptive innovations: “The problem with conflating a disruptive innovation with any breakthrough that changes an industry’s competitive patterns is that different types of innovation require different strategic approaches. To put it another way, the lessons we’ve learned about succeeding as a disruptive innovator (or defending against a disruptive challenger) will not apply to every company in a shifting market. If we get sloppy with our labels or fail to integrate insights from subsequent research and experience into the original theory, then managers may end up using the wrong tools for their context, reducing their chances of success.”
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