All human endeavors have always had unique risks, benefits, expressions, uses, and methods. They have mostly been local and specific to their own areas of expertise and skill. Rarely did the risks or benefits crossover to other domains.

But artificial intelligence is delivering advances in virtually every human undertaking and has already achieved a degree of general intelligence through the breadth of its impact on art, medicine, business, education, science, war, entertainment, and many other domains.

It’s hard to imagine any aspect of human endeavor that will not be impacted by AI, if it hasn’t already.

Taming fire changed the lives of early people forever. The invention of the wheel was another civilization-altering event, as was the written word, splitting the atom, the transistor, and coding of advanced algorithms into all those transistors. 

Science, mathematics, commerce, and publicly available computing provide contributions and developments that have seen broad impact across the entire span of the various endeavors of our civilization. 

But all those effects combined don’t approach the eventual impact of AI – for AI may bring us to the brink of survivability.

For the first time in our history, a technology will break free of the bounds of its creators — us. Releasing AI into the wild, giving out the source code, and enabling autonomy means that we no longer get to choose when we encounter machine intelligence because it will call the shots. 

And for better or worse, and unlike with fire, printing, the wheel, and computers, we will no longer be the smartest and most creative brains in the room.

All outcomes in business  happen only through the experiences we create. 

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I’m Bob Berry — researcher, speaker, writer, and innovator on the art of compelling experience.bob@itstheusers.com / LinkedIn