In December 2018, I gave a keynote via Webinar for Enel Power. They say it was watched live by over 800,000 on several platforms, and by June 2019, it had over 1.4m views on just one platform alone, by March 2024, that had risen to 1.8m. The core messages are even more urgent and relevant today. My physical audience in the room was 25 global influencers from every part of the world, all with popular blogs / followings on green tech and alternative energy. A massive global social media campaign took place in the run up to the Webinar.  Here are the key messages....

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including impact of AI on the energy industry, sustainability, green tech innovation and reducing global CO2 emissions.

* "How AI Will Change Your Life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's new book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books 

What will be the future impact of AI / Artificial Intelligence on our wider world?  The answer is that it will be massive in every dimension of human life.

Most of the influence of AI on your own life will be hidden, and hard to understand but the total combined effect will be very powerful, affecting decisions you make, influencing your thoughts, shaping your opinions, affecting your own unconscious bias and preferences.

To help explore these issues, I thought it would be revealing to have a conversation (below) about the future of AI with AI itself - using ChatGTP, a powerful Artificial Intelligence engine, which has learned about the world by analysing billions of words written by human beings.  My conclusion about the conversation is that ChatGTP is not telling the truth when it comes to the downsides of AI.

Word-based machines like ChatGPT are running out of text to learn from

Word-based AI machines like ChatGPT are already up against a limit in their training programmes. For example, ChatGTP has already read most of the available words online and is rapidly running out of new material to learn from! So the next step-wise improvement will need to come from other innovations in Artificial Intelligence, and from actually engaging with live human beings.

We can expect another major extension of AI language learning by feeding AI with recorded content - all the world's TV, radio and films for example.  But the total number of new words in all that is surprisingly small - human beings can't speak much faster than 130 words a minute, so even an hour of TV rarely contains more than 6000 words.

So what of the future?  How good will such word-based engines be by 2025?  Answer: good enough to convince most people most of the time that they are chatting online to a human being.

AI is already good enough to pass some student exams 

The AI system is already good enough to deliver coursework for exams, complete homework assignments, write press releases or information bulletins, write computer code, and so on.

Billions of pages of text have already been generated by AI bots like ChatGTP, potentially swamping the web and search engines with automated articles, social media posts and so on.  

This is already degrading the experience of human beings searching for world-class content, amongst all the automatically generated clutter.  

Text produced by AI is being swept up into the pool of all available text to train all AI future chatbots - so that AI text begins to train AI to produce more AI text.  This could easily result in a distortion, subtle at first, for example in literary styles. It will mean that early AI bots may have a profound impact on the language capabilities and "personality" of bots that follow.

So here below is the AI view of the future of AI.  You will notice that many of the answers are quite upbeat and tend to avoid discussions of risks from AI, threats in a world dominated by Artificial Intelligence.  Text created by ChatGTP is in italics.  My own comments are in bold....

* "How AI Will Change Your Life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's new book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books

And it will still also be true that 60% of manufacturing revenues in many nations will be production by companies employing less than 100 people. All these factors will shape the future of rail logistics. Expect 3.5% per year growth globally in rail investment. Expect a stampede towards carbon zero freight - eg locomotive engines running on green hydrogen. Expect huge investment in integrator technologies - whether to deliver carbon zero or to meet expectations of tomorrow's customers. Does rail have a future? What is the outlook for the rail industry in 2030? Is High Speed Rail the future? What is the outlook for rail transportation?  Video thumbnail image licensed by Shutterstock.

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's new book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including the impact of AI on rail transport.