Faisal Awartani (Ph.D.) : Senior Researcher @ Insights
Elizabeth Price : Senior Researcher @ Insights
Concerns about AI taking away our work are dominating headlines, and our 3am worries. But we should see AI a tool for maximizing our potential. Designing goals and achieving them is still the work of humans. AI makes us more efficient by helping us go further, faster.
Let’s test this logic out with a less controversial technology: travel. When you travel, you choose a place to go and then decide the travel technology based on how fast and efficiently you want to get there. If you decide to go from Anabta to Washington DC, your options are walking, driving or taking a train or an airplane – options that are progressively (exponentially, even) quicker, thanks to the technological leaps inherent in each.
Similarly, students and professors can shorten the time needed to achieve their research goals by using AI large language models responsible for generating text. Such models speed up the research process intelligently, saving the student or professor from hundreds of hours searching the internet summarizing results. The obtained text summary from the large language model might not make sense, since such algorithms are doing this work based on statistical models and has nothing today with cognition or conceptual understanding.
Therefore, if any person (whether a student, a professor or corporate team member) learns how to utilize AI models to help in implementing any of the tasks needed to achieve a certain objective, they will become more efficient than people who will not be using them. In other words, the person who chooses to fly to DC will get there sooner – achieving the goal with less effort and gaining time to get more done, before others arrive.