Broadly, we can think of change in two ways. One is like a river slowly changing its course a tiny amount at a time, and the other is like a tsunami where everything happens at once. The tsunami has a definite start, and we get very little time to respond, whereas the river changes its course so imperceptibly that we don’t notice it happening. In many ways, the AI revolution is a bit of both. There are a lot of small tsunamis and tiny amounts of imperceptible progress happening between them.
It is easy to be pessimistic and paint a bleak future where we all lose our jobs and are puppets in the hands of our AI-powered robotic overlords. The optimistic predictions of the future range anywhere between a utopia where no one has to work anymore, to all our problems being solved by this magical technology. The truth is probably somewhere in between, and the only thing we can be certain about is that any predictions we make about the future of AI will most probably be wrong.
So what do we do? The constant stream of news updates about everyone else “doing AI” can be paralysing, and the threat of us losing our jobs can be demotivating. The most practical solution to being stuck between hype and fear, is to do something! As the world changes, as uncomfortable as it is, we need to adapt. Adaption doesn’t happen all in one go, but is an accumulation of deliberate and intentional baby steps. If you have never used AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, it is free to get started. If you have used them, try them for work tasks that can be automated. If you have done that too, try learning about how you can use them for more complex tasks. As amazing as these tools are, they can still make mistakes. We must be careful that we are using them responsibly and checking the outputs they produce before using them. They can’t be used as a replacement to our thinking, at least not for now. We have to use them as tools to improve or speed up our thinking and work.
At 36ONE, we use these tools in many different ways. For quantitative research, we can collect, store and analyse data much faster than before, and we can improve the research process by finding and summarising research papers faster. We have also used it to speed up programming and further automate a lot of our processes. The idea is to let the technology work and have the data and analyses ready for PMs to make decisions faster. Everything is double checked by a human. This ensures that we focus on our core jobs of responsibly managing money for our clients, while using these tools to constantly improve.
To push the river-tsunami analogy a bit more, we can decide to flow and change course with the river, or end up getting hit by the tsunami!