AI and the Future. Part 1: My personal awakening

For my latest blog(s) I am going to digress slightly form the healthcare world jump on the AI bandwagon. This is a topic I have become fascinated with very quickly, so once I started writing, I found it difficult to stop and have ended up with a multi parter, probably my magnum opus of blog writing. Here is part 1, with part 2 to follow next Friday…

I had a rare couple of hours to myself in Leeds in January, as my son took his driving theory exam (he passed) and frankly I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wandered into Waterstones and browsed the best sellers and ending up leaving with Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World by Parmy Olson.

I had been a casual user of Chat GPT, and had showed mild interest in AI type articles on the news. As a business owner I had also been receiving an increasing number of marketing emails telling me my business could be transformed by AI and automation. As a man of a certain age, I think paranoia can kick in when new technologies come along, we can be prone to sticking to old habits and routines instead of embracing new tools and technologies, but no one wants to be the last player holding a wooden tennis racket.

This book blew my mind. As well as giving a fascinating account of the race between rival companies to generate AI and specifically large language models, it makes bold predictions about how AI will change the world and affect all of us over the coming years.

To me there are parallels with the changes we have seen through the advent of the internet age and the development of smart phones. Imagine being told in 1995 that within 20 years, everyone would have in their pocket a slimline, lightweight phone (unrecognisable from the landline and early mobile phones of the 90s) that would have computing power and storage 1000 times better than the average home computer in 1995, and not only that but this device would be able to search through pretty much all knowledge and information ever recorded by humans, and take digital photos and videos that you could instantly share with anyone. And yet I don’t remember feeling truly amazed at any point during those 20 years, (apart from perhaps when I turned my first iPhone sideways and the screen changed to landscape) probably because all of those changes happened in incremental steps rather than one big bang. The difference with AI is that I think the impact will be stronger and quicker, which in itself is mind boggling. I mean how much more advanced can we get!?

I have gone from casual Chat GPT user to full on Chat GPT evangelist. Considering it came out in late 2022, I feel embarrassed that I had not noticed it sooner. Between its release and late 2024 I have continued to use google, as if I’ve been cutting my grass with some garden scissors when there was a lawnmower sitting in the garage. Last spring I spent countless hours completing an online tender for a framework to supply staff into the NHS, without realising Chat GPT could have coordinated better responses, in a fraction of the time, had I only realised its potential.

I have gone all in in both my personal and professional life. I am particularly proud of now being a “vibe coder” thanks to Chat GPT. Not sure what that means?! Sit tight Gen X….

Chat GPT can basically write programming code for you. Think of an every day analysis or research problem in your working world, and Chat GPT can probably solve it. I asked Chat GPT to write some software code to allow me to search google maps for every single private healthcare clinic in the UK and output the result to an excel file along with the address and organisation website. Code written in two minutes, run it in a coding programme and a few minutes later you have your spreadsheet.

Another example – CV formatting. As a recruiter candidates send you CVs all the times and they come in various layouts and formats, but before you send them to a client they need to be standardised and put into our template with our letterhead. At my request Chat GPT wrote some software code that: Detects when a CV has been deposited in a folder and automatically formats it to my standardised template within 30 seconds. This was a task previously performed by a human and a tricky pdf CV with a lot of graphics and picture could take up to an hour for a human to fully format.

Colleagues are frankly getting bored of me talking about it, but for all of the advantages it poses some threats to us all too, which I will start to cover in part 2 next week…