That’s according to Google managing director and Columbia University Adjunct Professor, Tony Effik, who shared his “optimistic” view on the technology at the NEXT Summit Valletta 2025.
Effik gave the keynote speech in the Summit’s Marketing Hub, titled Return of the Polymaths: Redefining Expertise in the Age of AI.
In conversation with ShieldHub co-founder Ulrich Gilot, Effik gave his views on various elements of the AI revolution currently unfolding. Some of the key ideas from the session are set out below.
Digging holes
Central to Effik’s optimistic view on AI is that the technology is democratising expertise, putting an ever-expanding list of capabilities at users’ fingertips and increasing their potential for productivity.
“So the question that comes from this is ‘what do we do when we have all of this productivity?’ Do we do less? Or do we do more of the same, or do we try and do more of something different?” he asked.
The analogy he uses to explore this problem focuses on how technology has increased human productivity in the past.
“Before the Industrial Revolution, if you wanted to dig a hole, you could get five guys to dig a hole. And then one day, somebody invents the digger, and now it only needs one guy to do it.
“So, what do the other four do? You could buy four more diggers so that all of them are doing more. Or you could get the other four guys to help maintain the digger, build more diggers, etc.
“So I think now we have a similar thing. In the marketing world, for example, let’s say you have five people writing copy, and all of a sudden you have the power of AI. What do you do? Do you just have the one person managing the AI? Or do you have all five of them writing copy? Or do you use the other four to maybe start doing SEO and doing other tasks?
“What I’m arguing for now is that in this world of AI models, you’ll be able to get an individual that can do many different things at the same time. So this individual is going to be able to do planning by doing things like brainstorming with AI, generating insights, media planning, researching with AI, all the way through to prototyping with AI and doing measurement, and then being able to call on different functions and do all of this.
“This isn’t here yet, but we’re not far away from it.”
Beam me up
One crucial element of learning to use AI properly is the development of appropriate protocols, Effik argues.
“That’s why I’m very optimistic about AI, because if everybody’s got access to the same stuff, it’s actually how we behave with that stuff that’s going to be important.”
Here, another analogy helps him explain the importance of developing protocols.
“I think we’ve got something to learn in science fiction. If you watch a science fiction movie, you have characters that can teleport, they’ve got droids that can speak multiple languages, they can travel at the speed of light, but the person flying the spaceship is a human.
“Why does the human need to fly it? And the reason is because we feel that we need people at the deck. We need people sat at the bridge who are going to make decisions, because there’s something about that that’s really important.”
Meanwhile in the real world, “pilots have been flying with autopilot for decades now, and the pilots themselves are mostly used for takeoff and landing talking to air traffic control. Why is that?
“Well, you still need the pilot, and that’s because computers are really terrible at sensing. They’ve got no sense of death, and also they’re not good at understanding what to do when things go off script.
“And so the importance of protocols is really important. So you’re all going to have teams using AI that are all going to interpret things slightly differently, like my students do, and what I see is that when they don’t agree what the protocols are or what they haven’t thought about what to do about it, that’s when mistakes happen.”
The use of protocols and human discernment is therefore essential for ensuring AI is used with consistency to help avoid its potential pitfalls.
AI makes humans more, not less valuable
Finally, Effik argues that as AI continues to enhance our capabilities and brings expertise closer to hand, what will ultimately determine success is the sophisticated use of human discernment.
“The depth of specialisation that we all have to have just keeps increasing and increasing and increasing. But the world is changing now because we have expertise at our fingertips. In fact, we now have ‘college-level graduates’ [in the form of AI] that could work for all of us.
“If we all have access to expertise, then expertise itself becomes less valuable in its current form. And because expertise becomes less valuable, we have to decide what we do with all of the productivity and new time and resources that we get.”
Here, a third analogy helps Effik describe his point of view.
“I look into the past and I ask: ‘How have we as human beings in society dealt with disruptive change before?’
“And I’m going to go back to the 1830s when photography was invented. Before photography, the only way you could capture an image of yourself was if you had access to a painter, which most people didn’t.
“Today, we all have phones in our pockets. And so what we’ve seen is that we’ve democratised the capturing of images, and yet we still have painters.
“What you saw with painting is that painting changed. Before the 1830s, what was really important was that painting was able to depict something with a certain level of realism.
“But once photography happened, painting changed. It was less about depicting realism that became much more about the impression of what you saw. And hence, we had impressionism, and then you have expressionism, and then you get to abstraction, you know?
“So I think we as humans consequently start to value what is human even more, and the skills that we value most are about us as human beings.
“It’s about judgment. It’s about intuition. It’s about taste. And so those are the skills, the values that I think we societally are going to value more.”
Dingnews.com 09/05/2025