Artificial Intelligence. Overcoming our anxiety about the inevitable disruptions

  • Norberto Guimarães
  • 14 September 2022

Don’t be sidetracked by all the sensationalist AI articles focusing on the future lost jobs or pitfalls caused by AI. Embrace the much larger opportunities to use AI for good.

Artificial Intelligence has been making the headlines in the newspapers for years. Companies and the markets want it, some workers fear it, society deems it controversial. Clearly at the crossroads of technological and societal evolution, AI will certainly play a crucial role in our future. Like many previous disruptions, people often fall into two camps: those who claim that everything will change, and those who fear it and try to resist by conserving the status quo.

I claim it is better to overcome our natural anxiety about the inevitable disruption by embracing AI’s current potential instead of succumbing to our human evolution’s natural response to freeze, flight or fight. Such fear-based reactions take the form of debating endlessly the relatively minor negative implications of AI that the press likes to drum up when it extrapolates the technology far into the future and far beyond what is capable in the near and medium term. Surely there are already cases where AI is applied where it shouldn’t be because its current lack of precision can create actual harm. But these are far smaller in number and impact compared to the many more situations where AI could already be applied for significant positive impact but isn’t yet.

Thinking of artificial intelligence as a replacement for something that already exists is as scary as it is reductive. In some applications, AI systems already far exceed human-level capabilities, while in other seemingly trivial activities it is far behind. Hence, assuming that AI will inevitably put an end to our jobs, is highly exaggerated as for most jobs it will only replace parts of that job.

It will however definitely change the nature or enhance most  jobs though – like the arrival of the computer also did. Instead of dividing the pie, AI can greatly expand the pie, and enhance human activity. Let’s focus on that potential instead of the reductive thinking that AI is just replacing current activities.

In fact, this is core to our mission at Talka.ai: we are creating a conversational intelligence startup in order to improve human communication and enhance mutual understanding.

It does not replace human conversations, but can enhance them significantly. The AI can simultaneously look into thousands of conversational cues from the voice, sentences and visual aspects like facial expressions and body posture to understand the conversational nuances. And it can do this deep conversational analysis for tens of thousands of conversations in a short period of time. AI provides the analytics so that humans can better understand the customer pain points. Or which sales and marketing messages resonate best with customers’ needs. Or which product features relate to what customers care about.

Human communication is the driver of all meaningful relationships, both professional and personal. With the precious help of AI, we can make you a better seller, co-worker, parent, manager, friend, by helping you to communicate better. With a team of AI experts in Conversational AI and Speech from Google AI, Deepmind and Facebook Research in the San Francisco  Bay area, Toronto and Portugal, Talka AI is just one example of many companies working in AI for good that enhance human capabilities.

Don’t be sidetracked by all the sensationalist AI articles focusing on the future lost jobs or pitfalls caused by AI. Embrace the much larger opportunities to use AI for good.

  • Norberto Guimarães
  • Co-Founder & CEO at Talka.ai, and Founder LP at Shilling VC