The future importance of creatives
Betcade CEO David Chang looks at how artificial intelligence will help to automate more tasks and play an important role on mobile
Creativity and entrepreneurship are two topics Iâm very passionate about. And as artificial intelligence (AI) takes over more and more of the functions around us, they are also two of our most valuable assets.
There is a lot of discussion about the effect of technology in the gaming industry, which I believe will undergo fundamental change in the next few years. There are important reasons for this shift, the move to mobile is one of them, but in a broader sense the main catalyst is that the world is undergoing a transformation due to the maturing of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
ICT is what economists call a General Purpose Technology (GPT). GPTs are broadly applicable innovations that have widespread moral, societal, and economic impact. These are foundational technologies: think the steam engine or electricity versus your latest mobile phone model. GPTs take a while to permeate societies, but once they do they cause profound changes in the way people live.
Right now there is a lot of focus on AI and how it will lead to the automation of any number of tasks. Self-driving vehicles are a great example. Once self-driving vehicle technology matures a number of things will happen. Truckers, cab drivers, and even independent rideshare drivers may no longer have jobs. The impact on economies around the globe is in question. Certainly a massive amount of people will need re-training. But more subtle changes are also likely to occur. Many argue that autonomous vehicles will reverse the global steady stream of population migration into cities. Social services like schools, hospitals, and police departments will need to take this population reversal into account.
You may be wondering how any of this would affect the gaming industry. Self-driving cars probably wonât, but the ability for computer algorithms to take over most routine tasks probably will. For example, advertising networks will continue to become more efficient. On the face of things that seems good, right? But efficient doesnât necessarily mean cheaper and it also means that given an otherwise level playing field, the operator with the largest marketing budget wins. And it likely means that there will be fewer ad sales and user acquisition employees since employers are going to want to leverage their acquisition algorithms and it takes fewer employees to maintain a trading desk. This exact same situation has already occurred in the financial trading industries: the institutional trader is a job that has become nearly extinct.
Intelligent bets
Another interesting way that AI will likely affect your mobile experience is through the programmatic offering of in-game bets. Right now the placement of in-game bets in your mobile sportsbook app is largely a manual process. I believe it is a just a matter of time for when those offerings are programmatically generated through artificial intelligence that will not only take into account match and odds data, but mobile data â your geolocation (that may indicate a team preference), your past betting history (what you found enticing or not), and even where your friends are located (which may indicate a rivalry).
You may be wondering about how automation may affect you. In general, job roles that are most likely to be automated are those that fall into manual routine (assembly line worker) or cognitive routine (matching bids to asks) categories. Jobs that require cognitive non-routine tasks are the safest from disruption.
But computers can only do what they are instructed to do. They are not very good at asking new questions, coming up with new ideas, or performing creative work. You can define creative work as any task that humans are uniquely qualified to perform: re-thinking an industry or process, entrepreneurship, seeing the big picture, managing multiple functions or disciplines, designing interfaces to technology from a human perspective, persuasion, and leadership, to name just a few.
When asked for advice, I strongly believe that by leveraging what makes us uniquely human – creativity, innovation, ideation, complex communication, and experience – we will make ourselves increasingly valuable in the years to come.