In his 1872 novel, Erewhon, Samuel Butler explored the notion of self-replicating machines that had rudimentary consciousness but steadily evolved to become the dominant species on the planet. This essentially dystopian conceptualisation of thinking machines is a common Luddite fear stemming from "what does this mean for me" and often manifests in what Isaac Asimov coined the 'Frankenstein complex'. That movies have propagated these fears in the shape of HAL 9000 or the Terminator, has only further ingrained an almost visceral concern about the ends of artificial intelligence.
In the wake of the global phenomenon that is Chat GPT, I mused about some of these possibilities in Ghost Writers — Rise of the Machines, but this only dealt cursorily with the immediate ends of the technology in academia and did not address the strategic means on which an increasing number of companies are seeking to capitalise.
The business case for AI is a tantalising one which offers senior leaders the holy grail of:
