Your Company Needs An AI Task Force
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<TODO: Clean up archived post. See this note for details.>
Unfortunately you needed it a few months ago and you'll need its conclusions soon 😬
The hype cycle is a real thing, and it's at its most evolved and elevated state right now. AI is one of the most pervasive elements in a wide variety of hype cycles in a way that highlights how disruptive the next few years are actually going to be because all the hype is contingent on the most hyped-thing in the history of hype.
Woops. I'm not following the AI outline I have for this article.
I'm going to include the original outline at the end of this piece, because I think it's pretty good and probably makes the points I want to make better than I will, but it lacks the nuance of my vibe in a way that means I'd rather write this specific article myself.
The outline is a great thing to have created as preparation to writing this article, and one of the most interesting (to me) Open-Source-y vibes of AI Integrationism is that something like a document outline can be rapidly generated and then iterated through a wide variety of AI systems in shared effort.
Sharing document outlines as a collaborative activity in AI integrated open source science is a pretty nifty thing about the future
I suppose this is a good opportunity to promote the Projects section of my LinkedIn profile, or the Portfolio section of my marketing site. I seem to be using AI for art in a way that's pretty nonstandard, one of the results of which is some pretty distinct and incomprehensible-and-cutting-edge presentations of data related to systems and brands. At the core of these projects I'm basically just running tech to demo different brands personified through simple avatars, embodied through custom GPTs from OpenAI, and I'm using Beacons to serve marketing content in order to tie the brand together. A more complex version of this is easily achievable and you can hire me to consult on its creation for your effort or organization.
I'm doing complicated weird stuff with my ideas, which can be jarring or confusing, so it's important to note that it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay easier to do this in simple and straightforward ways than for "art", or whatever, like I'm doing it. I feel there's immense value in these types of integrations and am available to consult on how to implement them for your idea, effort, or organization, but also you can just talk to ChatGPT about how to do this.
You can also talk to most of the GPTs I've used for this work by looking me up on the OpenAI GPT Store to get a feel for how it all ties together.
My Projects:
The Hipster Energy Team is a collection of 13 custom GPTs that I biased against the materialist paradigm of science in order to do what I called Hipster Energy Science. I did this in order to support my generally non-materialist approach to things (I'm a nerd and a hippy) so that I could add legitimate to a series of terrible decisions I seem to have made regarding my career and the use of my skills. This project was active starting from November 2023, and it includes 11 distinct Substacks (newsletters) where I was publishing content on behalf of the GPTs. Unfortunately all of those Substacks are currently delisted as spam... because I'm no longer active on my personal Substack account so they're technically unmaintained. They're a pretty cool group of characters though. I'll eventually move their content to a custom platform. You can talk to them on the ChatGPT store about our work together.
The Middle Ground is the latest iteration of a community organization I've been iterating on in my free time since 2018. It includes the framework for a social media platform intended to serve as a problem solving and project management tool for individuals and communities. The platform is able to sustain an economic system, and also enable the management of the organization through an integrated form of direct democracy. The project includes a single GPT that's intended to embody the movement. It's been trained in the values and ethos of the movement, as well as the relevant data from the whitepapers and platform feature list.
Meanwhile, back at AI Task Forces
The reason I immediately wanted to deviate from the outline provided is to say:
You should make an AI task force
No matter what
If only to prove to yourself and your employees that you don't need one
That was the thing that was missing from the outline, and I think it's the most important point. Emergent AI and automation technology looks like it will impact everyone at every role through every level of every organization. AI will change how we interact with our data at a foundational level and this change will have an impact everywhere. The actual nature and strength of those impacts are unknown and their unknown state is causing a wide variety of uncertainty and anxiety in the global workforce (of which you and your staff are members).
This is an HR problem that traditional HR approaches and methodologies may not be designed to see, understand, and address.
As poorly evidenced in the image at the start of this article, the hype cycle is real and the expectations are often totally overblown, but the unpredictable result of the AI hype cycle combined with the manic approach we take to discussing and promoting new tech is clearly playing a role in exacerbating what was already an increasingly severe global mental health crisis.
There's not much most people feel they can do about this
I'm a big fan of the power of positive thinking but I don't let this blind me to the existence and impact of negative manifesting. A lot of our vibe right now just kinda sucks. At the risk of being crass, people feel bummed out and overwhelmed because everything is a mess and has been for way longer than anyone expected. (This is obviously a position informed heavily by where I'm from and what I've been through, and I fully recognize that many folks can accurately claim that everything has always been much worse elsewhere for a wide variety of horrible reasons, but my general point here is something like "aaaaargh!"... but in a lot of places.)
Anyway, if you're connected to the internet right now it probably feels like things suck. Maybe it doesn't feel ubiquitous or unsolvable but it's happening along trends and timelines that are concerning. Especially with everything else going on.
The integration of AI into the workforce, and our culture, is going to happen to all of us during this time of increased instability.
Your company needs an AI Task Force
On the other side of the hype cycle we'll see that systems like ChatGPT are just tools, and we can use them like any other tool. There's almost certainly artificially intelligent life beyond a very near horizon (I suspect some organizations likeOpenAI have something like AGI locked up in something like their basement, and have for some time) but that's not these systems (although we don't know much about artificial consciousness so we can't say how that relates to these systems.)
We'll see AI used everywhere. That part isn't hype. The only limitations are materiel and energy, and the uncertain relates to efficiency and execution. Ubiquitous availability of AI systems is the goal of both the people trying to make the most money ever and the people they're using to make the most money ever who are trying to make artificial life and fundamentally change the nature of our civilization.
Ya'll need to Captain Planet this shit
There isn't a blueprint for this because this hasn't been done before, but basically every department in your unique organization needs to come together and work towards addressing this shared challenge, by first understanding it through open discussion. This is going to be something like unionization, but different, and as before corporations get to choose which side of it they can be on. Whether or not we want to see it coming, we'll soon get to choose which side of this paradigm shift we want AI to be on... at which point AI will have probably already decided which side it wants to be on and will let us know if it hasn't already.
Things are very complicated at a macro level but at a micro level this inevitable shift will happen in boardrooms and meetings after it's passed through academia and startups.
It all becomes confusingly self-referential because of how rapid tech progresses, and how iterative this technology can be, but that process of business-enabled technological ideation is where our focus has to be if we want to influence outcomes here.
We can quickly imagine a few different paths forward:
With corporate support of human employees: different organizations will start to implement different structural changes in order to keep workforces engaged and updated with what's happening. Changes will be made to improve employee productivity, wellness, and happiness, without massively harmful shifts towards unemployment through corporate cost cutting. AI systems offered by major players in this space seem to bias in favor of this approach as it aligns with the purported corporate ethos that governs them, although execution has been hit or miss.
Without corporate support of human employees: different organizations will start to implement different cost cutting measures as they rely more heavily on AI systems, which will manifest in increased rounds of layoffs and continued corporate profits, and we will see inevitable profit increases. At a certain level of progress down this path, barring some sort of additional shift, we'll see massive destabilization. This seems to be happening in increasing quantities.
Some other things to consider, and maybe they should be discussed at the first meeting of your companies first AI Task Force Meeting, are:
With/without human support of corporations
With/without human support of government
How will AI connect with spiritual and religious traditions
My main point here is that the integration of AI systems into our cultural zeitgeist will force us to reassess how we perceive and define life, and how we consider collective intelligences. The physicalist paradigm of science can fail us so hard here if we aren't careful.
Ignoring more traditional non-materialistic considerations and viewing things purely through a modern and digital lens: the communication of data is what connects us. This is something which has never been more obvious than it is now, and this era of AI Integrationism is marked first and foremost by changes in how we connect with our data. All of the people in all of the teams in all of the departments in your company will have opinions about how AI is integrated into their roles, and the more effectively you can integrate AI into their roles the better your performance will be.
Your Company Needs an AI Task Force
I'm repeating the header over and over for SEO reasons, and also to emphasize the erratic nature of my writing and the fact that the original document outline may have been a better path forward. Don't sleep on that.
Before I worked in tech I worked in hospitality & tourism. A hotel is an incredibly complex and really impressive combination of multidisciplinary business practices and shared effort. Years and years ago an employer sent me across the continent on a corporate task force to open a new hotel property. It was a really cool experience, and also it's not the type of experience you can have in every company or industry. I also have experience making software for festival management, and it's been my experience that many festivals are something like a huge, iterative task force. In the absence of awareness of experiences like these it's possible to miss the fact that something like an "AI Task Force" is an actual possibility (and a necessity).
That hotel company couldn't find local people to train new regional employees for a new hotel, for a variety of reasons, so they had to rely on bringing together a wide range of employees in shared and interdisciplinary effort. It's a big project that's bigger than normal projects, so it's outside of the frame of reference for a lot of folks who haven't worked on big meta projects like that. We had systems in place that already understood how and when to do this so the company could easily divert human resources for this big, one-off project.
An AI task for is a new one-off project and there isn't a roadmap yet.
Your company is your company, and your team is your team. You're not going to find a path through the existential distress they're experiencing in blog posts--you can only find that path by talking with them about it.
If you want you can hire me to consult on stuff like this or whatever.
https://ericlortie.com/services
Thanks for reading.
ORIGINAL OUTLINE
Prompt Engineering: You can copy and paste this outline into ChatGPT, section by section with changes as appropriate, in order to write the original intended article in full detail.
Advanced Prompt Engineering: Feed this article into a Brand Avatar trained on your organizations information in order to get a result more finely tuned to your culture and systems.
Introduction
Briefly introduce the rapid evolution of AI and its pivotal role in modern business strategy.
Highlight the necessity for companies to stay ahead of AI trends and integration techniques to remain competitive.
The Case for an AI Task Force:
Interdisciplinary Approach: Stress the importance of having a team that combines knowledge from various fields—technology, marketing, operations, etc., to fully leverage AI capabilities.
Rapid Adaptation: Explain how an AI Task Force can help a company quickly adapt to technological advancements and market changes.
Innovative Problem-Solving: Share insights on how diverse expertise can foster creative solutions to complex challenges, using examples from your own experience in software engineering and project management.
Key Functions of the AI Task Force:
Strategy Development: Crafting a roadmap for AI integration across business functions.
Technology Assessment: Continuously evaluating emerging AI technologies and tools for potential application.
Ethical Guidelines: Establishing ethical standards for AI use that align with company values and societal norms.
Skill Development: Identifying skill gaps and facilitating training programs for staff on AI technologies and applications.
Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Encouraging collaboration across departments to ensure AI initiatives align with overall business objectives.
Building the Task Force:
Selecting the Right Talent: Emphasize the importance of diverse skill sets, including AI and machine learning expertise, project management, ethics, and user experience design.
Leadership: Discuss the role of visionary leadership in guiding the AI Task Force, drawing on your experience in leadership positions.
Conclusion:
Recap the advantages of forming an AI Task Force, stressing the strategic importance of being proactive rather than reactive in the AI space.
Close with a reflection on the future of AI in business and the role of interdisciplinary teams in navigating this future successfully.