December 2023 - MrCall

AI and Us

Posted on December 30, 2023 - 3:44 pm by malemi

Have you ever noticed how quickly our world has changed with technology? One day we were talking with Nokia phones, the next everyone was posting on Instagram and the like. And the next big change might just be AI, or Artificial Intelligence.

The question is: should we be happy that AI is entering our lives, or should we eye it suspiciously from across the room?

AI is certainly the ideal helper when it comes to chatting and sharing interesting things. It can hold onto a mountain of information and find what we need in a few moments. Generative AI can now even read and digest for us. That’s why in the book The Amazing Journey of Reason, written by Mario Alemi, the co-founder of MrCall, we find the idea that human society is increasingly transforming into a network of brains connected by digital synapses. We as a species as a whole are becoming smarter because we are getting better at saving a trace of what we know and sharing it, just like neurons do in our brain, and proteins in our cells.

But there’s a problem – AI doesn’t intimately understand being human. It doesn’t understand, for example, our jokes, our dreams, or why so many people love kitten videos (we don’t understand that either…). That’s why we need to treat AI as a team project: involve thinkers, artists, and emotional people – not just technicians – to ensure that AI doesn’t become a party crasher. Otherwise, AI could become like an autoimmune disease, mistakenly attacking the very entity that produced it and was designed to protect it. This metaphor serves as a reminder to align AI’s capabilities with humanity’s wellbeing rather than its potential harm.

Let’s say AI should be like our right hand, not the other way around. It shouldn’t be humans “training” algorithms with “likes” and “dislikes” to teach them which image sells more (it’s always the kittens in the end).

Otherwise, we risk ending up chatting with bots instead of other humans. AI is like any other powerful tool – to be handled with care.

So, what’s the situation? It’s really up to us to decide – AI is like a river. Channeled correctly, rivers have nourished civilizations, empowered communities, and created pathways to unexplored knowledge. But if left unchecked, rivers can flood and irreparably damage the very city they made great.

It should be our hands, and not just those invisible ones of the market, guiding the development of such powerful technologies. Nuclear energy has brought well-being where it has been used well, but disasters where it has been used poorly. And missed wealth where it has been rejected.

From Fire to Generative Artificial Intelligence

Posted on December 13, 2023 - 10:22 pm by malemi

From the time our ancestors discovered fire to today’s solar and nuclear power plants, we have witnessed energy revolutions that have fueled human progress. But that’s not all: there have also been information revolutions – from the birth of language to writing, from printing to telephony, and, of course, the internet.

Now here we are, in the midst of the web era, overwhelmed as if by a raging river. Our daily life, our species, our society, everything has changed. It hasn’t even been two decades, and we’ve gone from not knowing whether it was summer or winter in Brazil to being constantly informed about what’s happening on the other side of the world. In the end, we feel it close, as if it were right next to us. The world has become small, and perhaps a little better, despite everything. Yes, with ups and downs…

But there’s more. Illiteracy is becoming a thing of the past, and with it, population growth is slowing down. Women are studying, working, and the world, step by step, seems to be moving towards a slightly more sustainable future.

But there’s something that’s growing and getting worse: digital bureaucracy. Yes, that dark forest of rules, numbers, documents, and interfaces that seem to come out of a Kafkaesque nightmare. Who hasn’t cursed the municipal website while trying to pay a fine, right? Worse than the fine itself!

The realm of the absurd: we, the sapiens, with two million years of linguistic evolution behind us, after writing the Odyssey, now find ourselves pressing buttons on glossy screens like neurotic monkeys at the zoo. But, we believe, things are about to change: thanks to Generative Artificial Intelligence.

Did you think Generative Artificial Intelligence would only serve to make us laugh and cry with online content? That too. But the real magic lies in its power to change the way we interact with the digital world. Imagine being able to talk to a database as if it were an old friend. “Give me the addresses of the customers?” Done. And in the blink of an eye, without needing to know SQL.

An agent with Generative Artificial Intelligence could even navigate that awful municipal website for you. No matter how complicated it is: it doesn’t give up in front of a bad interface (but you still have to pay the fine).

And now, the million-dollar question (or rather, billion-dollar): how much is this technology worth? Look at OpenAI: from zero to 90 billion in no time. And Nvidia, with its microchips that run these software, is approaching a capitalization of almost a thousand billion.

A bubble? Maybe. But it might be not. If we think about the astronomical increases in market capitalizations in past years, who can say where we will arrive in a not-too-distant future? OpenAI, Nvidia, or some unknown new player – someone will scale these new heights. And we will be here, perhaps more neurotic, perhaps less, but certainly more connected to our digital world.