A Historical Approach to AI: An AI Trend Report

I remem­ber back in the 80’s watch­ing the inter­net come to life. It felt all-encom­pass­ing. It was for­eign and nov­el. But look­ing back, you might think we were sleep-walk­ing into a new era. For­get months or years, it took decades for the trend to take hold. It was a trend that would change the world. 

Speak­ing of his­to­ry, when I was a kid — no dif­fer­ent than today — we had a his­to­ry class. And year after year, the face of that teacher would change but the intro­duc­to­ry spiel would sound the same. Learn­ing about the past instructs us about the future, they would say. It nev­er rang out as a full truth to me. Sure, the past warned us of the mis­takes we could make again, but the future was a new horizon. 

When it came time to dis­cuss this AI trend report, I had an instinct that his­to­ry was impor­tant, not because the past spelled the future, but because it was entire­ly different. 

The inter­net had come on like the glacial shift of tec­ton­ic plates and now, AI was mov­ing like a tor­na­do out of the cor­ner of the rearview mir­ror in the midwest. 

We had to make sense of it…and quickly. 

It struck me we should start at the begin­ning. Like any strong orga­ni­za­tion, the think­ing and spir­it orig­i­nates with the founder. I said to my team, if com­pa­nies are going to decide what to do with AI, they’ll need to know how it works and why it was designed that way. 

We start­ed with the fore­fa­thers, folks like Geof­frey Hin­ton and Alan Tur­ing, and put togeth­er the puz­zle pieces for how this wave of tech­nol­o­gy might be best used today. 

The Beau­ty of a BluePrint

You take a guy like Geof­frey Hin­ton, a genius who mold­ed the blue­print for a tech­nol­o­gy that changed the world, and in no time at all, you can’t help but like him. 

These days, at 76, Hin­ton spends his time on an island, observ­ing and inter­act­ing with nature. But Hin­ton stoked the fire for his rela­tion­ship with AI as a young psy­chol­o­gy major. 

He liked the study of the human mind but he was also inter­est­ed in com­put­ers. He spent decades puz­zling over the thought that our thoughts rep­re­sent dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal arrange­ments in the brain. This, he called neur­al nets. And it made him mil­lions — $44 mil­lion, with the sale of a com­pa­ny that had improved imag­ing to Google, to be exact. 

It was the start­ing point for the way we think about AI today, which is to say that AI is mod­eled after the human brain. That means that while it may feel for­eign as a tech­nol­o­gy, it is actu­al­ly entire­ly famil­iar and that gives us a clear advan­tage in how we choose to use it and the strat­e­gy that we build around it. 

The Ground­work for Chat-GPT

The heavy hit­ter of the last year has been Chat-GPT and Alan Tur­ing played the key role there. He also devel­oped his think­ing around the brain. If humans could rea­son, solve prob­lems, and make deci­sions, then why couldn’t machines?

He devel­oped the Tur­ing test. It’s a test of a machine’s abil­i­ty to exhib­it intel­li­gent behav­ior indis­tin­guish­able from human behav­ior. It was the ground­work for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. So real­ly, these two men and their col­leagues set the stage for what’s going on in the news and on our tablets today.

How the His­to­ry of AI Informs Your Organization

We didn’t start with his­to­ry to bore you. 

There are some fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ters who have put a life­time of work into the trends we are see­ing emerge today. 

It can be hard to think about how you might use AI in your orga­ni­za­tion. You know you need to do some­thing, but to what extent and on what time­line remains unclear. 

Char­ac­ters like Hin­ton and Tur­ing set the tone and they pro­vide con­text for what AI is all about. They help us think about it rela­tion­al­ly, as opposed to some alien force sent to take over our orga­ni­za­tions and mar­kets. The bet­ter you under­stand AI, includ­ing the threats or chal­lenges, the more you can do with it. 

If you read a bit fur­ther into our AI trend report, you’ll see six exam­ples of how AI is being put to use in dif­fer­ent sec­tors. This is a great mod­el for how you can make the tech­nol­o­gy work for you in your organization. 

If you have any ques­tions about how to build AI into your strat­e­gy, we’re always hap­py to hear from you: kevin@​lawrenceandco.​com

To read more from the report, click here.

The Chal­lenge

• How can AI fit into the goals of your orga­ni­za­tion and sup­port your future?
• What are the major inno­va­tions AI could dri­ve that you want to ensure your orga­ni­za­tion ben­e­fits from?

Addi­tion­al Blogs 

• The Great Lead­er­ship of Char­lie Munger. Sharp. Right to the Point. And Right
• Big­ger vs. Bet­ter: What is Real Growth in a Business?

Old­er Podcasts

• Jim Collins Three Rules of Engage­ment for Healthy Teams
• What to Do When Your Team is Resist­ing Change

About Us: 

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