The AI Caution

I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That, Dave

Will artificial intelligence save us from ourselves? Will AI help the cause of a more perfect union? Will it give us perpetually bright, sunshiny days?

(Picture our wearing goggles that show us palm-tree-lined streets under cloudless blue skies, all while driving through a snowstorm in Fargo.)

The rapid development of AI brings with it all sorts of potential and promise and hope. Safer roads and highways. Clearer communication. More accurate evaluation of supply-and-demand issues.

And yet…

Well, we haven’t worked out all the bugs. Self-driving autonomous vehicles, for example, are performing anywhere between disastrous and better.

And this cautionary tale from a recent article in Quartz: “‘I just want to have peace in the world,’ OpenAI’s GPT-4 said as a reason for launching nuclear warfare in a simulation.”

As for our logistics and trucking industries, our friends at Transport Topics, reporting on the recent Manifest 2024 supply chain and logistics conference, titled their article “Trucking Executives Cite Opportunities for AI Adoption” (subheader: “The Possibilities Are Endless but Challenges Remain”).

The detailed challenges include “properly structuring and formatting supply chain data, which resides in different locations and comes from a variety of sources.”

Says Erik Kiser, CEO of the software firm Orderful, “That’s the big challenge ⏤ how do you aggregate all this information and put it in one place?”

Said another: “I think it’s overrated. It’s not as cheap as people think it is. Transportation is a pennies business.”

So: challenges. We’ve been there and done that before. We built railroad tracks across the nation, and then we built highways ⏤ across, and up and down,  and horizontally ⏤ throughout the nation.

That said, AI does seem like a different beast, with a different set of rules that we’ve never encountered before.

And all Dave really wanted was for Hal to open the pod-bay doors…