The coolest thing about being a PR “hired gun” is that it requires you to learn the ins and outs of all kinds of different industries: sports, tech, financial, entertainment, etc. It’s absolutely mandatory when PR pros onboard new clients. (Which, if you stop and think about it, makes sense: you can’t optimize a company’s brand until you know how its profit model is supposed to work.)
In fact, I always warn people: Beware any marketing “expert” who tells you how to run your company before he bothers to learn your profit model! It’s almost always stupid, off-target advice.
The most common reason why most businesses fail is because they create products and campaigns for their own amusement instead of being laser-focused on the desires and aspirations of their customers. That’s also why most marketing efforts fail: The marketer is marketing to himself, not to his audience.
This brings us to the multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
Until just a few weeks ago, the conventional wisdom was that it was an investment-driven enterprise: the country with the most capital would upscale the fastest. The future, we were told, would belong to the first country that achieves AGI — artificial general intelligence.
And the two frontrunners are the United States of America (hooray!)… and communist China (boo!).
Supposedly, AGI is an inevitable landmark on the roadmap to ASI — artificial superintelligence. When ASI occurs, the reasoning and intelligence of our AI systems won’t just be on par with the world’s smartest humans; it will exponentially surpass it.
And before long, these AIs would become hi-tech gods, capable of calculations and breakthroughs that far exceed a million-trillion Albert Einsteins. The possibilities are near endless: cures for diseases, new solutions to complex social problems — who knows what our AI gods might do!
It’s a cool story. And it still might happen. But most people — and certainly most businesses — aren’t demanding an AI that’s a million-trillion times smarter than Albert Einstein. Instead, they simply want an AI that helps them finish a book report or summarize long, boring business emails or help their company with a handful of specific tasks.
Hellbound and Down 