Is AI Just the Latest Automation Tool?

­TechRadar has a piece up that likens AI to the printing press and the calculator – tools that initially caused a moral panic but which ultimately proved to be a boon for humanity. But is AI really just the latest descendant of the steam engine? Or is its underlying feature fundamentally different from prior innovations?

According to Brennan Lodge, Fractional CISO at DeepTempo and founder/CEO of BLodgic Inc., “When AI is done right it sharpens the edge. The printing press did not end learning. The calculator did not kill math. Email did not destroy productivity.”

But Brennan is looking at AI through the lens of a businessman – sitting out this particular zeitgeist cedes the advantage to competitors. Generative AI might be dominating the consumer market, but AI also allows us to parse through multitudes of data and automate a variety of tasks exponentially quicker than before.

At first glance, AI is yet another automation tool that can improve our collective workflows.

“I have seen AI help filter through thousands of alerts that would otherwise bury a security team,” says Brennan. “The model does the grunt work and flags patterns that look suspicious.” 

But AI isn’t just an efficiency tool. For one, AI is almost impossibly quicker than the alternative – far faster, comparatively speaking, than prior innovations. And with AI exploring the creative arts with the same vigor and proficiency as the industrial space, there really is no role that AI can’t fulfill (and arguably perform better than humans).

Maybe we won’t see a viable AI alternative to the full scope and scale of the human workforce in our lifetimes, but it’s headed, inexorably, in that direction. What’s stopping it?

There’s also the small – and potentially catastrophic – notion of an AI singularity, at which point it grows and develops far beyond our control and understanding. Even if we’re not facing a robopocalypse scenario, how can we possibly parse the tech’s net benefits when humanity, itself, is the obsolete technology?