The Future of Problems

In the almost 10 years that I’ve been writing about the great story of our time - the rise of machine intelligence - I’ve continued to point to two qualities of the human animal that will be immune to machine based substitution, namely creativity and service. Though machines will become ever more capable, our creativity will allow us to imagine new things to do beyond their scope. And though sci-fi has filled our head with fantasies of robots tending to our every wish and whim, we will always live in a Barbara Streisand world - people will always need people.

I want to now add a third ray of hope for those amongst us who fear, as Geoffrey Hinton does, that o3 (and o4, o5, etc etc), Deepseek, Gemini, et al, placed in the “invisible hand” will beget a world of Morlocks and Eloi - our deep-seated ability to muck things up. [Please feel free to substitute “m” with “f”.]

Simply put, though we humans have been to the moon, raised the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and built the extreme ultraviolet lithography machine, we have also created the Department of Motor Vehicles, sold home printers that can’t connect to wifi, and allowed insurance companies to hide behind impenetrable phone based menu systems. For every step forward we have taken as a species on the long march from the savannah to the space station we have made incredible progress but created new problems along the way.

This, the greatest little secret of the technology industry - that every new solution creates a new problem - is, in fact, our greatest hope. For in every problem lies our - i.e., we humans’ - route to continue relevance. And a paycheck.

When I was a junior boy at PWC, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was part of a team bidding for a new project. During the Q&A following my team’s presentation, the prospect quietly asked, “given that we have the problem that you are going to monetize, why don’t you pay us, rather you we pay you?” I can’t recall what was mumbled as a response but I do recall we didn’t win the job.

The cheeky client (well, never actually a client) had a point. Problems are the currency of the consulting industry (and many other industries too). PWC’s strap-line at the time was “Solutions for Business”.

Will AI solve all the problems of the known universe? Not even Sam Altman could claim that. Will AI solve some problems but in turn create new problems. Highly likely. Those problems will be your opportunity. Ad infinitum; Latin for “wash, rinse, repeat”.

On my travels over the last few years telling the great story of our time, it’s been my common unfortunate experience to spend the first few minutes of my presentation getting the projection equipment to work properly; “forget about AI” I stammer, “let’s first fix the AV”.

Machine intelligence is set to profoundly reshape our world in the new few decades - want to bet that reshaping won’t include new problems for humans to work on?