The Ending of an Era: How AI is Redefining Our Legacy #57 #cong24 #legacy

Synopsis:

When we look back on this time, it will feel as transformative as the arrival of the internet. The tasks we grapple with in our work today may soon feel as antiquated as sending mailshots via post. But our legacy won’t just be about adapting to AI; it will be about how we shaped its impact.

Will we use AI to solve meaningful problems, unlock creativity, and deepen human connection? Or will we let fear hold us back from progress?

The tools may change, but the essence of work—creativity, connection, and innovation—remains timeless. As we approach this new era, the question isn’t just about how we’ll work—it’s about what we’ll leave behind.

What kind of legacy will you create in this AI-powered era?

Total Words

1,237

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

1. We Are at the End of a Work Era
The way we’ve worked for decades—manual processes, human-first systems, and intuition-driven decision-making—is giving way to a new era where AI is integral. Just as the internet revolutionised communication and productivity, AI is poised to redefine how work is done across industries.

2. AI is a Tool for Amplification, Not Replacement
AI isn’t here to replace human creativity or ingenuity; it’s here to amplify them. From automating repetitive tasks to uncovering insights faster, AI allows us to focus on high-value, strategic, and creative efforts.

3. Change is Uncomfortable but Necessary
Like previous technological leaps (e.g., email replacing post, cloud computing streamlining collaboration), the integration of AI into the workplace comes with challenges. However, embracing this evolution with curiosity and intention can unlock incredible opportunities.

4. This is a Pivotal Moment for Humanity’s Future
We are at an inflection point where the decisions we make about AI will shape the trajectory of work, society, and even human identity. Our legacy will be defined by how we balance innovation with intention, using AI to bridge gaps, foster inclusion, and create a better world for generations to come.

About Maryrose Lyons:

Maryrose Lyons is the Founder of the AI Institute.
Passionate about the intersection of humanity and technology, Maryrose is a vocal advocate for using AI as a force for good, empowering individuals and organisations to adapt, lead, and leave meaningful legacies in this transformative era.

Contacting Maryrose Lyons:

You can see connect with Maryrose on BlueSky and LinkedIn.

By Maryrose Lyons

The Ending of an Era: How AI is Redefining Our Legacy

Think back to the 1990s. If you wanted to run a marketing campaign, it meant designing a flyer, getting it printed, stuffing envelopes, and paying for postage—then waiting days or weeks to see any response. Today, you type out an email, hit send, and track real-time analytics within minutes. What once required a team days of effort can now be done solo in an afternoon.

That shift wasn’t just about speed or convenience; it completely transformed how we approach work. Now, we’re standing at the precipice of another revolution—one driven by AI. This moment isn’t just another technological shift; it’s the end of an era.

**The Evolution We’ve Lived Through**

Whether you’re in marketing, project management, or customer service, you’ve seen firsthand how work has evolved. Remember the days when scheduling a meeting required endless phone calls and calendar coordination? Now, tools like Calendly handle it in a few clicks.

Or think about data analysis before Excel and cloud computing. Teams relied on hours of manual calculations, prone to errors. Then the internet introduced tools that made global collaboration and data management second nature.

We didn’t just survive these changes; we adapted and thrived because of them. They freed us from the mundane and let us focus on creative, strategic thinking. The same is happening now with AI—but on an even more transformative scale.

**How AI Fits Into This Evolution**

Just as the internet redefined work in the early 2000s, AI is revolutionising nearly every task we do today.

Writing a report? Tools like ChatGPT draft polished versions in seconds.
Generating a design? AI platforms like DALL-E can create stunning visuals in moments.
Sorting customer data? Machine learning algorithms uncover trends faster and more accurately than ever.

AI isn’t just about doing tasks faster; it’s about doing them better. These tools enhance our work, allowing us to focus on the big ideas that truly move the needle. They’re not here to replace us—they’re here to make us better.

**AI as an Amplifier, Not a Replacement**

What’s exciting is that AI isn’t just about automating the old ways of working—it’s opening doors to entirely new opportunities:

Content creation: Entire marketing strategies, once requiring weeks of effort, can now be ideated, drafted, and optimised using AI-powered platforms.

Recruitment: AI tools don’t just match keywords; they identify candidates based on skills, values, and potential fit in ways even seasoned recruiters might miss.

Customer support: AI chatbots don’t just answer FAQs; they learn from interactions, offering smarter, more personalised responses over time.

Much like the internet transformed us into publishers, AI is making us collaborators with tools that think, learn, and create alongside us.

**Navigating the Challenges of Change**

Change, however, is never easy. When email first arrived, many feared it would depersonalise communication. Today, similar anxieties surround AI. Will machines take over our roles? What happens to our sense of purpose if AI can perform tasks we took pride in?

But this is where our real legacy takes shape. AI isn’t about removing the human touch—it’s about amplifying it. It lets marketers focus on crafting unforgettable campaigns rather than manually crunching numbers. It enables engineers to innovate instead of getting bogged down in repetitive debugging.

The real question isn’t whether AI will change work—it’s how we’ll use AI to transform it for the better.

**Building the Legacy of Tomorrow**

When we look back on this time, it will feel as transformative as the arrival of the internet. The tasks we grapple with today may soon feel as antiquated as sending marketing mailshots via post. But our legacy won’t just be about adapting to AI; it will be about how we shaped its impact.

We are standing at an inflection point for humanity, a moment when the decisions we make today will ripple into the future for generations to come. AI is not just another tool—it’s a force that could redefine what it means to work, collaborate, and create. Whether we use it to deepen human potential or allow it to widen gaps in equity and understanding will depend entirely on the choices we make right now.

This is a time to be bold, to embrace AI not with blind optimism, but with intention and care. It’s up to us to ensure that these technologies amplify creativity, solve meaningful problems, and serve as bridges rather than barriers. The way we integrate AI today will set the foundation for how societies thrive tomorrow.

Will we lean into this change, guiding it toward progress, inclusion, and shared success? Or will we leave it to chance, missing an opportunity to truly transform the way we live and work? The tools may evolve, but the heart of our legacy lies in how we rise to this challenge—with wisdom, courage, and an unwavering commitment to shaping a better world.

As we approach this new era, the question isn’t just about how we’ll work—it’s about who we’ll become.

What kind of legacy will you create at this crossroads for humanity?

November 18, 2024 2024 Legacy No comments yet

The Legacy of Homo sapiens in the Age of AI #53 #cong24 #legacy

Synopsis:

“The Legacy of Homo sapiens in the Age of AI” reflects on the idea of legacy, both on a personal and a collective level. It begins by exploring the values we might want to pass on to future generations, such as kindness, curiosity, hard work, joy, and love. It then considers the broader legacy of humanity as we reach a defining moment in history: the creation of artificial intelligence that could surpass human intelligence. The article highlights the importance of developing AI ethically and responsibly, ensuring it contributes to human well-being. Ultimately, it suggests that humanity’s legacy will not only be measured by what we create but by how well we preserve and share the values that make us human.

Total Words

807

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. Legacy and Values: Personal and collective legacies are rooted in kindness, curiosity, hard work, joy, and love.
  2. AI’s Historical Impact: Humanity is at a crossroads, creating intelligence that may surpass our own.
  3. Ethics and AI Governance: Our species’ future depends on developing AI responsibly to enhance human flourishing.
  4. Preserving Humanity: Embedding core human values in AI ensures our legacy reflects the best of us.

About Victor del Rosal:

Victor del Rosal is Chief AI Officer at fiveinnolabs. He has worked as Director of Strategy and Business Development at CloudStrong, Irish cloud services provider, and as Head of Business Analysis for High Tech & Telecom at the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Supply Center of Excellence.

Victor is author of the book Disruption: Emerging Technologies and the Future of Work, ranked #12 on BookAuthority’s Best Technology Trends Books of all time.

He is lecturer of MSc in AI for Business and other Masters programs at National College of Ireland and corporate trainer on generative AI for the UCD Professional Academy (Dublin, Ireland).

Contacting Victor del Rosal:

You can see connect with Victor on LinkedIn or see his book HUMANLIKE

 

By Victor del Rosal

What do I want my legacy to be? What do I want to be remembered for? What do I want to leave behind? These are questions we might ask ourselves. When I do, I think mostly of my children. Four answers come to mind: kindness, curiosity, hard work and joy. Ultimately, the fifth one would be the most important: knowing that they are loved.

But what if we took a step back and reframed these questions from a collective point of view: What might be the legacy of Homo sapiens?
What do we want to be remembered for as a species? What do we want to leave behind?

We have been around as a species for over a quarter million years, or closer to 300,000 years to be more precise and, according to Raup and Stanley (1978), the average lifespan of mammalian species is estimated at 1-2 million years, so we might still have a little bit longer to go. Not so fast, though, there might a ‘but’ and an ‘if’ in there…

We stand at a pivotal moment in human history. Our species, which evolved through the Great Leap Forward some 50,000 years ago gaining remarkable cognitive capabilities, is now on the verge of creating artificial minds that could match or exceed our own intelligence.

This isn’t just another technological milestone, it’s potentially the most consequential development in our species’ history. We are literally creating new forms of intelligence, something that has been the exclusive domain of evolution for billions of years.

The legacy question becomes even more profound: Will we be remembered as the species that successfully navigated the transition to an AI-enabled future, ensuring these powerful tools enhance rather than diminish human flourishing? Or will we be known as the ones who created our own successors without sufficient forethought?

Our legacy might well be defined by how we handle this transition. The decisions we make today about AI development, ethics, and governance will echo through generations, potentially affecting not just our children, but the very trajectory of intelligence in our corner of the universe.

How to successfully navigate this transformation? This is my question. We might need the kindness to ensure AI benefits all of humanity, curiosity to explore its possibilities responsibly, hard work to get it right, and a focus on joy to maintain our essential humanity.

Most importantly, just as I want my children to know they are loved, perhaps our greatest legacy as a species will be ensuring that whatever forms of intelligence we create are imbued with the values that make us human at our best.

We might be at a crossroads in the evolution of our species, and our legacy may ultimately be measured not just by what we create, but by how well we preserve and transmit the essence of what makes us uniquely, intensely, and authentically human.

November 18, 2024 2024 Legacy No comments yet

Mirror, mirror, on the wall… …should this guy get bail or not? #46 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

My contention is that even though AI (Generative AI) can’t draw a realistic hand to save its life, it is a powerful window into a reality we might otherwise not see.

Total Words

946

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. AI is not just a bad renderer of human hands.
  2. AI is a mirror that shows us truths we might not want to see, but should.
  3. The material we use to train AI is a fair representation of ourselves. And the cold, unbiased eye of AI is the perfect way to see the truths contained in it.
  4. AI can show you the truth, but it’s up to you to do something about it.

About Richard Ryan

I have worked in Advertising for approximately 30 years. I am a copywriter, which means I wrote the very words that made you choose that specific box of cornflakes, or cellphone plan or midrange server.

I work in a small, full-service ad agency in Brooklyn NY, called Something Different. What actually makes us something different is we solve your business problems with smart, plain-spoken, deeply human ideas. It what every agency should do, but sadly doesn’t.

I live in New Jersey, where I enjoy having four distinct seasons.

Contacting Richard Ryan

You can check out Richard’s personal site, and the Something Different Agency or send him an email.

By Richard Ryan

We’ve all sniggered at the oddly-webbed, six-fingered hands that AI draws for us. Or laughed at ChatGPT when it tried to gaslight a New York Times reporter and convince him to leave his wife for the program. And then there’s the Pepperoni Hug Spot commercial.

But don’t let that sideshow fool you.

I think AI is a powerful window into our reality. Or, to be more precise, a mirror. A mirror that shows us truths we might not want to see, but should.

Consider how Generative or Creative AI works. We feed it a set of things. The more the better. Things we write, draw and create. Images. Books. Letters. Scientific papers. Greek poetry. Whatever we want. And it absorbs them all. Then, using its super complicated algorithms, it “learns” what we’re showing it. It sees the patterns in what we’ve done. And then tries to recreate it. By guessing. Based on what it saw. It’s a hugely powerful trick. This way it can learn to code. Or converse in Chinese. Or if we give it millions of mammograms and medical data it can learn to spot breast cancers with uncanny accuracy

You could argue that it doesn’t actually understand anything. It’s not filtered or underpinned by emotion or beliefs or context. It just spits back the reality of what it sees.

So to my point. What does it see? Well, it was recently reported that when you ask Midjourney (which is a picture-generating AI) to create pictures of doctors, what it sends back are images of white men.

Possibly not what you’d expect, but it’s reflecting back what it has seen. It’s the truth.

What do those images tell us about our reality? Or about opportunity? Or about whether we really value diversity?

Admittedly, although it’s a thought-provoking fact, those are just pictures. No harm done. But that’s not always the case.

I said AI has taught itself to read mammograms. It’s way better and much faster than humans. It’s so good, doctors don’t quite understand what it’s seeing, or how it does it, but it has saved people’s lives. The problem is, while it’s very good at spotting cancers in white women, it’s not so good at spotting breast cancers in people of color.

That also teaches us something about our reality.

Because – just as with the doctor pictures – the data sets we’re using to train it are from real life, taken from a health care system that is biased and skewed.

The reality our AI is reflecting back at us is a reality where we don’t treat people equally. We treat some people worse.

That’s what the mirror is showing us.

In March of this year a judge in India couldn’t decide whether to grant bail for a murder suspect so he just asked ChatGPT to give him the answer. Chat GPT said the guy didn’t deserve bail because the program considered him “a danger to the community and a flight risk.” So the judge said fair enough and sent him back to jail.

Of course that’s a story of one lazy judge. That behavior would never become institutionalized, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, it could.

Right now, if you’re booked into jail in New Jersey, the judge when he’s deciding whether to send you to jail or not, has a small black box that uses risk-assessment algorithms to help him make his decision. Not quite autonomous. At least not yet. But when that AI does come on line, what data sets will be used to teach it? Whichever they are, they won’t be equitable. The data sets that comprise all the information on the US incarceration system were built up over centuries of hugely racist government policies.

So the decisions that AI will return – either go to jail or go home – will reflect and reinforce a reality that isn’t remotely fair.

That won’t be a few harmless pictures of white doctors, that’ll be someone’s life.

So the next time your AI doesn’t send you back quite what you’re expecting, don’t blame it for not getting reality right. Consider that, in its unvarnished, unemotional way, it may be getting reality exactly right.

Then, once we see that reality, consider what we want to do about it.

December 9, 2023 2023 Reality No comments yet

Is it time to Brainstorm with Google? #35 #cong18

Synopsis:

We are seeing technology disrupt and fundamentally change our society. Soon AI will be able to suggest ideas based on insight. It will change how we see creativity, but ideas will be a precious commodity. Where do ideas come from now?

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Technology has remapped society
  2. Our notion of creativity and ideas need to change
  3. AI will one day suggest ideas based on data
  4. Ideas will be a currency that we need to invest in now to avoid disruption

About Cyril Moloney:

Cyril Moloney is a Director at Teneo, specialising in technology, with nearly 20 years in technology communications in Ireland and internationally, he has seen technology go from the back room to the good room.

Contacting Cyril Moloney:

You can contact Cyril by email , connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

By Cyril Moloney.

Voltaire once wrote ‘originality is nothing but judicious imitation’. In an age of data driven insights, iterations and reboots, are we in danger of losing the creative spark?

In a famous TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson said that we needed to re-evaluate education as we needed to teach and prepare the next generations for industries that did not exist. That was 2006;

  • Twitter was founded
  • iPhone was nearly a year away
  • Bebo was popular in Ireland
  • Facebook was two years old and was finally opening itself to the public
  • Google had just acquired YouTube
  • Cambridge Analytica was still five years from being founded

Fast forward to today and we are seeing more disruption at an ever-quicker pace. But are we seeing the ideas needed to adapt? Everything around us today, ranging from culture to consumer products, is a product of ideas coupled with intelligence.

Algorithmic Intelligence
With the coming of Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the next few years, will this be a milestone that will force us to embrace creativity and up our ideas game? At the most basic level AI needs data to analyse and will derive insights based on what has already happened. As it develops its ability to deliver insights at an exponential rate, is there room for ideas, or will we use AI as a crutch to create, safe in the knowledge that we reduce risk of that idea failing?

However, one lesson to bear in mind is that Big Data is not automatically Big Insight. Data can hide biases, be skewed or be incomplete. It may not represent the bigger picture or give you an insight that you can build on.

Ideas as Currency
Robinson highlighted that creativity is ‘the process of having original ideas that have value’
As AI and other new technologies infuse into our collective psyche, we have no concept of how it will change our society, our working and personal lives. All we do know is that ideas will likely become more valuable than money. We can bank on AI transforming job sectors and roles. With that will come disruption, but also the opportunity to create new industries around it. If you look at the car, that not only made horse drawn carriages obsolete, it created roads, service stations, and remapped societies and human behaviour in less than a century.

To that end, we will need to fundamentally reassess how we encourage, foster and support new idea generation. It may be time to rip up things we thought were certain, as we may only have a few years to adapt ideas to an ever-changing reality that will create more questions and enable new realities.

A recent Microsoft and EY report highlighted that Ireland was beginning to ramp up its AI activity, and needed investment and support. Now is the time for government, academia, business and the artist to get together and generate ideas for a society that may not exist yet and help address new challenges and opportunities that have yet to pass.

In 2004, a book called “The First Idea” suggested the development of our higher-level symbolic thinking, language, and social skills could not be explained by genes and natural selection but depend on cultural practices learned anew by each generation over millions of years, dating back to primate and prehuman cultures.

We rapidly need to create a culture of ideas and creativity if not, we run the risk of judicious imitation, something AI can already do.

October 26, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet