AI is in everything from cars to cradles and it shouts from every booth on a trade show floor. Lawrence Crumpton likens the tech explosion to a gold rush with everyone vying for a piece of the wealth just to stay relevant. But he says the true value of AI is leveling the playing field by eliminating the tech divide so that everyone can fully participate in society. In this wide-ranging interview, he sat down with EXHIBITOR to discuss everything from science fiction to slavery as he described his approach to navigating the future of tech.

EXHIBITOR Magazine: Machine learning often comes up during discussions about AI. Can you explain what machine learning is?
Lawrence Crumpton: Traditionally, people write programs that let computers execute a task by following a set of instructions. In machine learning, instead of giving a machine step-by-step instructions, you provide it with massive amounts of data so that it learns patterns. It's called training, and eventually the machine learns that for a given input, it should produce an outcome. So if I want to know what bird this is, I can train a machine to not just say this is a swan. I can train it that swans are medium sized, live this long, eat these things, and you never see it in the desert. Then I can show it a picture of a random bird and it can tell me if it's a swan.

EM: Is AI a type of machine learning?
LC: Yes, it is. But AI is different. AI can perform a task with human or human-like output. What makes it useful is that it can perform a task like an expert. And it can be interacted with using normal human things like listening, speaking, reading, seeing. So it understands context and responds to context using something that is remarkably close to reason.

EM: Can you describe industrial AI?
LC: Let's start with Bill Gates. He said Microsoft's mission is to put a computer in every home. It's a modern vision and it's designed to empower people to do more because there's a digital divide in terms of equity. There are people who have been unable to participate fully in modern society because of lack of skills, expertise, or access to computing. And those issues exacerbate all kinds of problems, including how people learn.

I work with a guy who's a doctor. His first project was to teach phones to diagnose pneumonia because it's a big killer in the developing world. And he managed to do that using massive amounts of data from the breathing sounds of people with pneumonia and without pneumonia. Putting that type of power in people's hands changes lives and allows everyone to more equally participate in society. Not that we should measure society by productivity, but the entire world is built around you being self-sufficient and able to go out and negotiate and reason and compete. The world is inherently unfair, but these tools done at scale allow people to look after themselves and have a better quality of life.

On a commercial side, a lot of companies are losing expertise as people retire or they have questions with answers locked behind hiring an expert, but the answer could be as simple as an AI that can see the entire history of your company. EM: I know AI is not new. So why do we see it everywhere now?
LC: The main reason is good, high-quality, accessible data. I have a photo from 1955 of someone loading a five-megabyte IBM hard drive into the back of a cargo plane using a forklift. And your phone currently takes a single photo that would be more than 5 megabytes. And that hard drive in the 1950s cost somewhere around $1 million of today's dollars. The first requirement of training is having massive amounts of data, but back then, companies couldn't afford the data costs.

The second reason is that computers were too slow. The Apple watch is 50,000 times more powerful than the computer that put humans on the moon. We're using it to tell time and track our pulse. And if you think about the size, one took up a mission control center and the other you wear on your wrist. The concept has been around, but the tech finally caught up. And that speaks to where it will be five years from now.

EM: AI seems to be in everything now. Does it need to be?
LC: There's AI marketing and there's actual AI. The reason you see it everywhere now has nothing to do with AI. It's a gold rush. People want to lane grab because that attracts investment. Regardless of the actual problems that get solved, there's value in being perceived to understand the space. Now, it's going to shake out quite quickly because there are only a few companies, organizations, and nations that can make the needed kind of investment. I would say that today, there are only a few actual companies producing AI. Everyone else is on the periphery, but they're not core to the conversation. If they disappeared tomorrow, AI would proceed.

Because it's a gold rush, we haven't seen the useful stuff yet. We've seen a bunch of experimentation as people try to figure out the value. But between 2023 and 2027, our day-to-day lives will be unrecognizable. In fact, I think we will experience more tech change between 2023 and 2027 than we experienced between the years 2000 and 2020.

In 2001, I had a research device and I was using it on a bus to read my email and the news. I was the only person on the bus with a mobile device. Everyone else had newspapers and magazines, but I remember the stares like I just stepped off the Enterprise. That's the level of change we'll have in the next three years.

EM: A lot of people who read this magazine are concerned about remaining relevant in their career as AI continues to rise.
LC: That's a big question, and I don't have the answer. But let's talk about blacksmiths. At the turn of the century, there were blacksmiths in every town because there were a lot of horses. Cars came around and you didn't need as many blacksmiths. But even today, the trade hasn't gone away. It just became proportional to the available work. I see that as the model for any progressive tech.

When I went to university, they didn't have computer science. Now there are degrees in computer engineering. What we get trained to do is going to shift tremendously and jobs created by it will offset the losses that come about from it. Also for a lot of the complex tasks, the risky stuff, you always need an experienced human in the loop. You can't turn it entirely over to a machine. Even in surgery, you need an experienced human there to take over. For a long time experienced people will be aided by machines, not the other way around.

But what if I'm a person who wants to sell goods and services? I have to compose, build, create, manufacture, produce, and get those services out to the market. Can I afford the swarm of AIs needed to do that in an efficient, hands-off way? Probably not. I probably need a team of people who are empowered by a team of AIs, and I can't see that changing.

The flip to that is that the genie is out of the bottle. How we respond to it is incredibly important. It doesn't matter if the US, Australia, or the UK restricts it. Because Russia, China, Iraq, Iran will not. These nations considered political adversaries are going to invest, and if you take your foot off the pedal, better for them.

The other thing is teaching people about scams and being safe. The trainings, skills, courses, all the way down to kindergarten need to take this into account. You want somebody to understand what's happening, but preventing them from using the tools means they're guaranteed to not know what's fake when it hits their inbox. You've got to teach people, and you've got to teach them early. And it's not teaching a topic. It's teaching critical thinking. That's what makes us human, and that's what AI can't replace. That's where our value will come from in 20 years.

And the last piece, I believe we have reached a point where we can work out a feasible, universal basic income. And that doesn't mean people get paid to do nothing. It means that there is a contribution from the government to pursue what you're interested in and what you're good at without having to fight for subsistence and ultimately, if you have machines doing the grunt work, you have people doing what they love. I am one of the lucky humans. What I love, what I'm good at, and what I'm paid to do are all the same. Everyone should have that. Everyone should be valued for what they're able to contribute and love. It's a privilege, but it shouldn't be a privilege. My son doesn't want to go into computers. He wants to go into construction. He will design awesome things and he'll teach machines and machines will go build them. And that's what makes him happy. I don't see a reason to force him into getting a Ph.D. in economics. Let's all of us make it possible for him to go build stuff. It's not like we have a lack of stuff to build.

EM: I don't have faith in our society to create the idyllic world you describe.
LC: You're talking about a deeper problem than tech. I used to believe that access to information would sort it all out. I don't believe that now. I think critical thinking saves us. I don't think it's a coincidence that you elected a party in America whose first goal is to restrict what can be taught. That's a really short runway. And think about the cascading failure that could happen as a result of that type of thinking. You can't spend your way out of that problematic a society.

The only other thing I can think of that was this massive in American history is slavery. They set up an entire system based on human bondage. They created laws to keep people in bondage and prevent those people from acquiring any status or education. They fought a ruinous war, the result of which is that we released millions of people into a society with laws against them and no means to fend for themselves. We are 400 years later and America is still not recovered. You repeat that mistake around educating people, around giving them the means to compete, the means to understand and make a way for themselves, you'll have equally ruinous outcomes. I can't be more blunt than that.

Supporting people should be the sole function of government. Tax money should not be paying for tax breaks to corporations. And if you keep electing leaders who support that, you won't be able to afford the bill when it comes through. So people who say they're investing in AI aren't investing in AI. They're investing in calculators. Tech will change no matter what. Invest in your people.E