Why You Need To Embrace AI, Even If You Don’t Want To
The rapid advancement of AI technology means that organisations must embrace AI to maintain a competitive edge and avoid becoming obsolete. While there are understandable reservations, leveraging AI tools for tasks like content drafting, email optimisation, and brainstorming is necessary for improving efficiency. Utilising AI in your membership organisation ensures you remain competitive, helping to streamline operations and keep you from being outperformed by others who adopt AI technology.
I realise that many people have personal reservations about using AI, particularly due to its potential environmental impact and the possible ramifications for job security, not to mention humanity's future.
However, I think that for now, it is something that several of us have to use in order to stay competitive. To this end, I have come up with an extended metaphor to explain why we all should be embracing AI despite our personal reservations about it, which I have plenty of. So, stick with me on this one, I promise it’ll make sense.
An Unnecessarily Detailed Extended Metaphor About AI
You walk through the echoing lobby of a towering high-rise, surrounded by people in tailored suits, absorbed in their own worlds. Expensive corporate art lines the walls, intriguing enough to catch your eye, but ultimately bland and mass-produced nonsense.
You approach a sleek silver elevator and press the up button, which glows softly red. A few moments later, the doors slide open with a hiss, revealing a mirrored interior. You step inside alongside a man in a suit whom you don't know; you exchange polite nods. You press the button for the ninth floor, and the doors slide closed. The elevator lurches and drops half a foot, and a jarring, grinding sound fills the air. The main lights die in an instant, leaving only the ominous red glow of the emergency lights in their place.
You glance at the stranger, and you both realise you're trapped in an elevator; it's a fear everyone has, but you always assumed would never happen to you.
You start searching around in the dark elevator, looking for the emergency phone or anything to help you out of your predicament. That is when you become aware of a third occupant, whom neither you nor the stranger noticed when you first entered. A large, angry African Leopard.
You both stare in horror at the leopard; it snarls, sending a gout of hot breath into the elevator. Your blood runs cold, and your heart attempts to abandon you by desperately attempting to thump its way out of your chest. Unfortunately, your ribcage holds, and you are forced to confront this horror.
In a futile attempt to befriend the leopard, the stranger fishes a muesli bar out of his pocket and attempts to offer it to the cat. You know this will fail; you know you and the stranger are doomed. This Leopard will kill you both, and there is nothing you can do about it; so you simply turn around and face the broken elevator buttons, pretending that the leopard isn’t there.
The leopard looks from the stranger who is watching it and attempting to befriend it, to you staring resolutely in the other direction. Its choice is simple, its aggression predetermined by millions of years of genetic coding; kill the one that’s not looking at me. It pounces.
Its claws dig deep into the flesh of your back, and the force of the hit knocks you forward; your head painfully clatters off the elevator wall. However, the pain is short-lived as a moment later it goes in for the kill.
Your world goes black; you are dead.
The leopard will be satisfied feeding off your body for several hours before it eventually turns on the stranger and devours him too.
My Point About AI
In that metaphor, you are someone who doesn’t use AI, the stranger is someone who does, and the leopard is AI.
My point here is that chances are AI is going to upend our world massively and quite possibly destroy humanity, but if you embrace it, it will kill you last. I realise that’s basically the pitch for H.P. Lovecraft’s eldritch horror from beyond the stars, Cthulhu, but here we are.
I personally don’t like AI, and use it as little as possible in my personal life; however, when I’m at work, I use it all the time. I use AI editors, email tools, and chatbots to help me brainstorm and plan work more efficiently. I do this because it makes me more efficient and quicker at my job; if I don’t use AI, it’s only a matter of time before I lose my job to someone who does.
To be clear, that’s not an internal Member Jungle policy; in fact, they have made it clear that people will not be losing jobs to AI. However, not every company and workplace is going to take a principled stand on this, and consumers sure as hell won’t.
That is the point I’m driving at here. The average person who does not use AI will not lose their job to AI; they will lose it to a person who does use AI and is more effective for it. If you don't use AI in your professional life, you will sooner or later lose your job to someone who does. If you don’t use AI to help make your membership organisation better, sooner or later, you will lose your members to an organisation that does. It’s kind of like fossil fuels, we know they are bad, and we do our best to minimise our use of them, but unless you work from home in a house covered in solar panels, we all have to accept that “making it” in this world is going to take the use of some fossil fuel.
AI in our current world is like being stuck in a lift with a leopard. No one’s thrilled to find themselves in this situation. If anyone claims to be thrilled, they are either lying or fundamentally do not understand the risk of being trapped in an elevator with a leopard. However, you are much better off facing the leopard and attempting to be its friend than you are turning around and pretending it isn’t there.
What Can You Do About AI?
Brace yourself for one of the most depressingly pessimistic stances ever.
You need to use AI while also fighting against it. You need to use it to make emailing your members quicker and more effective, and you need to sign petitions to put limits on AI development, to keep it out of weapon targeting systems, and to stop it from stealing human work and creativity. If a system offers AI tools, use them, use them for everything they’re worth, but fight against AI, too.
If we do not use AI in the short term, we will lose members, jobs and opportunities, and if we do not put hard limits on AI development and usage soon, we will lose a hell of a lot more. At the end of the day, AI has potential for so much good in this world, but it also has the potential to cause so much harm, too. We need to ensure that proper limits, rules and regulations are put in place.
And now, a cute REAL picture of a puppy to lift the spirits.
How To Use AI To Help Your Membership Organisation
I realise that I have made a lot of very dramatic-sounding claims about the dangers of AI; however, they are not unfounded. Below is a list of sources from experts in the field explaining some of these very tangible dangers.
- AI 2027 - If you do one thing today, read this.
- AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity? This video from the BBC explains the above AI 2027 research paper and also asks other experts for their opinions on it.
- ‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years
- Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact
If you want to know more about putting the brakes on AI development, check out any of the sources below:
If, after all that, you are ready to start looking at AI and how you can utilise it, check out our blog category on it, AI and Future of Clubs.