The Robots Are Coming

There’s a lot of worry and concern regarding AI. Some folks happily ignore it while others wonder Will AI take my job? Can AI take over my computer, car, dishwasher… and turn on me.

To fuel the fire, there are lots of movies that depict robots thinking for themselves and turning on humans. I watched Subservience on Netflix. In this 2024 flick, Megan Fox is a robot purchased to care for a home and children, and you guessed it, besides getting naked, Megan turns on the humans.

This is nothing new. Check out the 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. While HAL ain’t nothin’ compared to Megan Fox, it’s pretty frightening. And that was 57 years ago!!!

As much as I laugh about this, I don’t take it lightly. We’re introducing the ability for computers to read everything that’s ever been printed. They’ll learn more than we ever could in our lifetimes. Computers will have the ability to learn. They already have the ability to act. A computer controls my car.

Remember when pressing the gas pedal opened the throttle and made the engine rev and the car go faster? How nostalgic. Today’s cars take the signal from the gas pedal, feed it to a computer that decides how much fuel to add to the engine.

Computers control my car, open my home’s front door and do my taxes. What happens when they’re smarter than me?

Learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are tough subjects for many of us to get our heads around. It’s hard to imagine how they work and how they might be used.

I heard a great demonstration of the usefulness of AI on a podcast over the weekend.

I’ve written posts about researching companies. How we need to read the annual report and read at least 2 analyst reports. And when I say read, I mean skim. I’m not reading a hundred pages, I allocate 15 minutes to find something interesting.

So, my 30 minutes or so of analysis helps me have a better understanding of the company. But imagine if I truly read not just the current annual report (cover to cover), but all of them. For some companies, this goes back years. For Berkshire Hathaway, I’d be reading annual reports going back to the 1960s.

And then I’d read the financial reports. And while reading, I’d stop and compare data from the current report to the prior report. I’d compare to other companies in the same industry.

I was a slacker in school. I loved cliff notes and was excited to “share” assignments with other students. Teamwork is always more efficient right?

I hated the students who read every book, went to the library, did extra credit…There are so many more interesting things to do with my time.

But computers have all the time in the world. They don’t complain about working 24×7, reading mundane facts and figures and storing what they read in memory and making complex comparisons.

And while this is not all that new, the ability to take all of this data and draw conclusions is.

Grok can tell me what 2001 a space odyssey was about

That’s pretty cool. It can search the web and provide data.

But I can also ask it to think.

Here, Grok needs to make a decision. While Grok doesn’t take a stand on the quality of the movie, it provides relevant information about how others perceived the movie.

And in the process, it’s learning. Just like us, it first does some research, but now it knows what the movie is about, and how it was received by audiences and critics.

And this research doesn’t just happen when I ask for info from Grok. These AI bots (computers) are out reading everything in existence, categorizing, comparing, learning and summarizing while we sleep.

Pretty fascinating. What’s next?

Podcast

Back to the podcast…

As an investor, having access to everything that’s known about a company is a huge advantage. While I’m out there skimming an annual report for 15 minutes, another investor is taking advantage of AI and has insights I could only get by spending thousands of hours researching analyzing and comparing.

The folks that provided the podcast – The Motley Fool – have hired lots of AI folks to build tools to help customers of the Motley Fool take advantage of this new capability.

What This Means

Are HAL and Megan Fox coming after us? Will our car turn on us and take us some place we don’t want to go? Maybe to Megan’s house?? Who knows.

However, what we do know is that AI can already make our lives easier and make us more efficient.

AI can do a far better job than I can of researching and evaluating a company. As a Motley Fool member, I have access to their tools that utilize AI, but I can also use Grok or ChatGPT to help me learn and make investment decisions.

Both my daughter and my brother use AI heavily in their work. My brother asks AI to write some code that will perform a task.

AI can definitely take on some assistant-type work leaving us to play golf or do other fun stuff.

Other Implications

Beyond this, I’ve been thinking and reading about the other implications.

We talked about the computers working 24×7. That’s significant. What does that mean for chip builders and cloud providers? I suspect they’ll be building more chips, building more data centers, building out more infrastructure…That’s good for a lot of companies in which I invest. Yay!

All of this computing takes lots of power. While this could be a boon for power companies and infrastructure companies, it will put a strain on our already strained electrical grid. Google and Microsoft are getting into the nuclear power generation game to help supplement their tremendous energy needs.

What does this likely mean for the cost of energy as demand goes up and our grid needs enhancement? I’m pretty happy about my decision to go solar.

Wrap Up

Despite the hype and the fact that most over-hyped things never come to fruition – remember the metaverse and NFTs? Facebook renamed the company to Meta. People were spending millions on homes in the metaverse and more millions on NFTs to decorate those homes. When was the last time you visited the metaverse? Does it still exist? What does that home go for?

AI though is likely here to stay and likely to change a lot.

Megan and HAL may be coming for us if we aren’t careful. In all seriousness, we need to be careful how we deploy AI so it’s used for good and not evil.

How we do things – everything from work to entertainment – will change in some way.

Things like energy may become more expensive or more difficult to obtain because of demand. All those who lived through the energy crisis in the 1970s remember gas station lines and the importance of the last digit of your license plate number.

It’s easy to write stuff like AI off, but it’s worth reading a bit and thinking about the implications of what we learn.

If you have questions, just ask Grok:

and when Grok says he’s not interested in taking over the world, do we believe?