Make Penang AI plan a bridge for majority

LOOKING back at my ­relationship with artificial intelligence (AI), I feel like a farmer seeing others in the next kampung using buffaloes to pull their ploughs around 5,000 years ago.

Better pull the plough ourselves, I would have thought. Only then can we feel the soil for problems.

Thus, it was with a flash of angst that I signed up last year for my first account to use a large language model, a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT).

I did not like reading the output of any GPT, which were spreading all over the world since 2023.

Too much flourish. Too pretentious, nearly pompous and they over-explain everything like writers who worry the reader won’t understand.

But I had no choice because so many people were using it.

If I did not adopt the tool and somehow make it work, I would be left behind.

So, with some grumpiness, I went through the learning curves of adopting yet another innovation, wishing in vain for my world to stop changing for a few years.

When the latest AI bubble grew in Penang for “technopreneurs”, I groaned because it came with big words: Creative Creator AI One-Person Company Incubator Programme (CCAOPCIP).

That’s the latest Penang government programme launched on July 2.

The state government made the right move, starting something to guide society to embrace AI.

But waving the “technopreneur” flag risks alienating the critical majority.

The CCAOPCIP should be for early adopters to lead the majority through this valley of innovation instead of being for early adopters to find more early adopters.

Remember those decades-old, highly successful books titled For Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide?

The people who bought Accounting for Dummies had no intention of becoming accountants.

So instead of looking for 20 technopreneurs, maybe try this: bring into CCAOPCIP groups of 10 hawkers, 10 retailers, 10 doctors, 10 mechanics, 10 lawyers and 10 company secretaries in Penang.

Give each group an AI mentor for six months.

Let them evolve and discover the challenges and opportunities, tips and tricks.

The goal can be just to help Penang’s small businesses to save one or two manpower hours a day through AI use.

Multiply that by the number of beneficiaries and imagine the improvement to quality of life.

In the diffusion of innovation theory, studied since 1962, a huge obstacle – described as a chasm –lies between innovators, early adopters and the majority.

Perhaps the CCAOPCIP can be that bridge.

Late last month, a man in his 70s came to The Star Penang office to express how fed up he was because we can no longer pay the water bill at the post office.

Post offices were where we could get so many errands done for decades but, well, times change and frankly, it is so much easier to pay online once we learn how.

The challenge behind the CCAOPCIP is a big one.

Millions of blue collar workers worldwide lost their jobs when steam engines rolled in to herald the Industrial Revolution.

Later, of course, the blue collars evolved and became expert machine operators.

Now, with the reasoning powers of GPT models thrown in, the Information Age seems ready to send millions of white collar careers down the way of the dinosaurs, with Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) cutting 8,000 jobs and reshuffling another 7,000 two months ago.

It wasn’t because times are bad; it was because those workers just aren’t needed anymore.

So evolve, we must, and innovators and early adopters might need to realise that engineers build Formula One cars while it is racing drivers with their amazing reflexes that drive them without crashing.

Engineers create pianos while pianists make the music.

May the CCAOPCIP soon bring in the majority.