Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they did not know how
Perhaps they’ll listen now
I fear your thinking has somewhat dark undertones of the rise of professional financial hegemony in business.
That’s as maybe but for me as a scientist the spreadsheet has been truly remarkable by delivering capabilities to manipulate data and to a limited extent text - it has spawned its own vocabulary ‘slice & dice’, ‘compare & contrast’, ‘embrace & extend’ and so on. All based on the simple idea that you can put something into a cell and then provide any number of manipulations based on the properties of the cell (don’t get me started on pivot tables).
At its core AI does a similar job, and offers similar revolutionary freedoms, but does this on ‘cells’ which are nuggets of meaning (all via a form of semantic normalisation enabled by RAG). My own research is applying this to contested opinion from multiple different authors and their ideas scattered across books and papers.
I cannot ensure AI will not bring the same dark undertones by as Neil Postman points out this is not the fault of technology “technology is neutral”