We need a more sophisticated debate about AI
Maybe I&#x27;ll look like an idiot for saying these things in a few years. Maybe I&#x27;m naive and maybe I&#x27;m even a little bit cynical, but shouldn&#x27;t we wait until there is something to have a debate about? From my anecdotal perspective we haven&#x27;t seen a lot of areas where the recent AI &quot;developments&quot; are going to have a meaningful impact on how we do business. I work in a non-tech focused enterprise organisation which develops and sells solar, which involves a lot of data. Both in terms of running power plants, but also financial and legislative data. Much like the rest of the world, we&#x27;ve tried hard to implement GPT into our workflows, and we&#x27;ve frankly had very little success making it do anything useful. Ok, that is not entirely true, because it has been fairly successful at competing with our RPA software. Long story short, a lot of our software and a lot of the workflows in our company involve moving and manipulating data between systems. With GPT some of our more technically inclined workers have been able to successfully automate parts of their workflows in a way that no no-code solution has been able to do before. So there is certainly some success, but we were already doing these things with RPA and other no-code solutions, and the long term strategy for these things is still to be better at buying software that comes with API&#x27;s so that we do not need &quot;digital gaffatape&quot;. This is obviously never going to happen, and it is great that the &quot;digital gaffatape&quot; has improved, but it hasn&#x27;t exactly blown our minds. But it has been an improvement.<p>That is, however, the end of the usefulness. In every other attempt, we&#x27;ve come up short, and it&#x27;s not for lack of trying.<p>I work as an external examiner for CS students, however, and this is an area where I have seen a massive disruption. Because ChatGPT is really great at cheating. Not so great for the students who enter a final, and find themselves unable to answer things they would have, if they had written their work themselves, but for a lot of education I think there will be a need to rethink how we teach and test students. Which is a great thing, mind you, but how much money can that really be worth for these AI companies?<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m probably wrong, but I still think it&#x27;s healthy to wait and see what happens before we waste too many legislative resources on it. Imagine if we had spent resources on the Blockchain hype. I&#x27;m sure a lot of people will line up to tell me how wrong I am about this comparison, but we regulate Blockchain quite heavily in the EU now. So it&#x27;s not like the legislative branches can&#x27;t grind into gear once something actually happens.