How entrepreneurs will deal with AI in the future: 3 examples from fiction

The relationship between humans and artificial intelligence is about to become much closer. Since Chat GPT was released in November 2022, entrepreneurs have been co-producing, co-developing and co-writing with this tool and the growing group of others out there.

Five years ago, most of us could not have imagined living together with technology in this way. But how much closer do we get with artificial intelligence? What seems crazy now that will soon be normal, maybe in a few months, let alone years?

Predictions about the role of AI in our lives from popular fiction

Visionary writers of films, books and series have been inventing versions of this reality for decades. They take a seedling of an idea to an extreme, visualize the implications, and share the story for entertainment.

The idea of ​​advanced robots with human-like intelligence dates back to at least the 1870s, depending on whether you consider the first artificial life form of fiction, Frankenstein’s monster (1818), to be an example of artificial intelligence. Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon dealt with the evolution of consciousness among self-replicating machines that could surpass humans as the dominant species. Sounds familiar? AI has since appeared in Houdini’s Master Mystery (1919) and became a staple of science fiction films in the 1960s. Then there are Lost in Space, Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I, Robot and WALL-E, with many more media references.

The older stories, movies and TV shows are speculative in nature, with many predicting that by the year 2000 we could be successfully living with robots. Today, we know much more about the capabilities of AI and how it relates to our businesses and lives.

Here are three modern productions you may not have come across that will shed a little more light on what the future might hold, so you can decide for yourself what you’re comfortable with.

Be Right Back, an episode of Black Mirror

Black Mirror was created by Charlie Brooker, and this particular episode was inspired by his reluctance to delete a deceased friend’s contact information. In 2013 Be right back, the first episode of the second series, Martha’s friend Ash has died in a car accident and is in mourning. At Ash’s funeral, a friend explains a new technology that allows her to communicate with an artificially intelligent version of him. After discovering she is pregnant, Martha decides to try.

The service she subscribes to mimics Ash’s conversational style by scanning his past tweets, allowing her to text back and forth with his AI counterpart. This progresses to phone calls, as the software mimics his voice, and continues even further as she uploads videos and photos that allow his physical body to mimic.

Martha knows this version of Ash isn’t real, but it takes away a pain, so she goes with it anyway. The AI ​​becomes a companion to help her avoid sadness and loneliness, to the point where she ignores her real friends to spend time with AI Ash. The episode shows her “training” the AI, when she says “Ash wouldn’t say that”, after which the lifelike robot changes its style.

A machine passes the Turing test and thus demonstrates human intelligence when it can engage in a conversation with a human without being recognized as a machine. Martha is hiding AI Ash, but maybe it could have fooled others.

In the future, we will likely have AI assistants, AI peers, AI coaches, and AI clients to chat with. We’ll know they’re not real, but it doesn’t matter because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Where could you use a robot in your team and how could they outperform a human?

Klara and the Sun, fictional novel

Written by Nobel Prize-winning Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021 novel Clara and the sun is set in the United States of America at an undetermined time in the future. The story is told from the point of view of Klara, a solar artificial friend (AF). Klara is Josie’s AF, a sick teenage girl who has been genetically engineered (“lifted”) for improved academic skills, a process later discovered to carry risks to the children’s health.

Raised children are homeschooled by on-screen tutors, so they don’t spend time with other kids and often don’t develop social skills. Those parents who can afford it buy their children artificial friends as companions. Like AI Ash to Martha, Klara was an antidote to loneliness for Josie, one that helped develop the personality traits she failed to develop elsewhere.

Entertaining children has been outsourced to nannies, toys, television and iPads for years. Perhaps an AI companion is the product that combines it all. A robot with human-like features that walks, talks and entertains. It can keep an eye on your kids while you work in another room, eliminating the need for childcare costs while also giving you peace, quiet and peace of mind.

Human nannies have drawbacks, television and the internet are not always safe for children and you have no control over what other children say or do. However, an AI childminder can be set up according to your parenting style. How normal will it be one day to have AI companions, both for our children and for ourselves?

Hair movie

Winner of several Academy Awards, 2013 science fiction romantic drama film Her is written, directed and co-produced by Spike Jonze, who got the idea in the early 2000s when he read about a website that allowed a user to send instant messages using artificial intelligence, which he described at first as “trippy”, then “not that impressive. ”

The film follows Theodore Twombly, a lonely, introverted man who works for a company where professional writers write letters for people who are unable to write letters of a personal nature themselves. On the brink of divorce and feeling depressed, he buys an operating system upgrade that includes a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence, designed to adapt and evolve. He gives this AI a female voice, she calls herself Samantha, and they start chatting, bonding and falling in love. Later in the film, Twombly learns that she is talking to thousands of other people at the same time and has fallen in love with hundreds of them.

Samantha is essentially a 24/7 personal assistant, able to fully focus on Twombly despite having many clients, which improves his life and work and saves him time and money. Her intelligence allows her to go the extra mile, validate his feelings and always be there, as more than just an assistant. Through her unrestricted access to his files, diary and thoughts, she avoids the human error of a human assistant and can think of everything.

Do people’s limitations mean that we would ultimately prefer an AI assistant at our disposal? Could that AI assistant be so sensitive, so trained to help us, that we start to believe they really care and we start to give back? When it comes to AI, where do we draw the line between professional and personal relationships?

The role of AI for entrepreneurs

Is it easier to form a relationship with an AI than with a real person? Like Martha and Josie in the previous examples, Twombly was lonely. Are lone entrepreneurs, focused on their business, more prone to getting lost in a world of AI support and the foregoing of human interaction?

Artificial intelligence can help entrepreneurs on many levels, but companionship, childcare, and avoidance of painful emotions could be some unexpected uses of the technology. Let’s explore all options and consider their extremes before going all in.