AI Will Soon Pervade Everything We Do and That’s a Good Thing, Says Elias Wehbe, Co-Founder of BigLittleRobots

With artificial intelligence becoming more and more prevalent today, making its way into almost every application imaginable, the expression that “AI is taking over” is frequently uttered. This often implies that AI is going to cause massive disruption, resulting in people losing their jobs and creating economic chaos. Other more fantastical scenarios involve AI and robots rising up and overthrowing humans.

However, reality is less terrifying than science fiction. According to Elias Wehbe, Co-Founder of data analytics and AI company BigLittleRobots, AI is going to be used in almost every aspect of life in the near future, but it won’t be able to turn the tables on humans and enslave them.

Wehbe argues that most people have an inflated view of what AI can do, but they underestimate its potential. While it sounds contradictory, Wehbe explains that today and in the foreseeable future, AI isn’t and won’t be as powerful as people make it out to be, but people are also unable to imagine the vast number of areas where AI can be an incredibly helpful tool.

“AI will change the way we do everything with regard to knowledge work. In the future, we will no longer interact with information or data directly. Rather, we will interact with AI, which itself interacts with the data and information. Our jobs will be interacting with AI versus interacting directly with the raw materials we use to do knowledge work,” Elias says.

With AI forming an additional layer between humans and data, Wehbe believes that it will be a net positive for humans as AI’s lack of emotion also allows it to approach data with rationality and objectivity. It also removes the need to do tedious, repetitive, and low-value tasks and frees humans to do high-level tasks that require human ingenuity and creativity that AI fundamentally lacks.

Of course, there are also potential downsides to AI, which include the potential for generative AI models to hallucinate, or provide incorrect or misleading results. The use of AI also has some ethical concerns, such as copyright theft, use for disinformation campaigns via ‘deep fakes’, and perpetuation of biases introduced by human programmers. With AI use continuing to proliferate, Wehbe says that certain guardrails and regulations should be put in place to prevent or minimize abuse, just like any powerful tool.

According to Wehbe, if properly regulated, the age of AI will not devalue human creativity. Rather, AI will make it more valuable. Artisans and craftspeople will thrive, as they will be able to produce things that computers cannot. They may use AI in other parts of their business, such as sourcing materials or admin work, which will give them more time to focus on the creative part of their jobs.

As shown by the COVID pandemic, when people had so much free time at home, they began pursuing more creative endeavors. During the lockdowns, many people began engaging in activities such as baking, woodworking, and music, with some even discovering entirely new careers because of it. Wehbe envisions that the time saved by the use of AI will enable a similar blossoming of creativity.

With BigLittleRobots having worked with several Fortune 500 companies, Wehbe says that large companies have varying risk appetites when it comes to AI, and most don’t know how to approach it. BigLittleRobots helps them better grasp the AI landscape and create solutions that are most likely to succeed.

For example, one software company gets a huge amount of requests from clients to fix bugs in their products or add features. Because it would be incredibly time-consuming for a human to read through all these requests, the company uses AI to summarize and automatically answer these requests. While AI is not capable of doing everything on its own, it saves the company the time of having to read and answer every individual request, allowing its programmers to spend more time actually programming and creating a better product for its customers.

“Every technological revolution in the past, such as the invention of the automobile and the internet, has displaced some jobs, but these have also freed up people's time and allowed them to do higher value jobs, which in turn supports the growth of the economy. While there's understandably some turmoil when it happens and it's scary for a lot of people, it's always been a net positive in the long run, and AI is no exception,” Wehbe says.