COLUMN: Gerardine Schreurs
The theme for this edition of the magazine is AI & Technology. As I write this column, my thoughts wander to the evolution in that field over my working life of several decades. Having just graduated, I found my first job in the international hotel industry. The means of communication at the time was the telex, followed not much later by the telefax. The big advance from then on was that you could save messages, although in the beginning you had to copy every fax because the ink on the original paper miraculously disappeared after a few weeks.
About the same time, hardly anyone had their own computer on their desk. I was with four colleagues in a sales office where only the secretary had access to a word processor.
For years, I used a personal diary in which I noted my appointments that were readable only by myself. When I worked for a large PR agency in the 1990s and the agency manager wanted to switch to a digital outlook diary in which read and write rights could be assigned to someone other than yourself, resistance was strong. After a few months of mutiny, the battle was over and we all saw the huge benefits of shared information.
That everyone is now using mobile information-carriers like laptop and phone was once unthinkable, let alone that we could imagine a future in which AI would play such a major role. We are at a crossroads. Let's choose a future where AI strengthens us rather than replaces us. In which technology serves humans and not the other way around. Again, the question is not whether technology changes our world, but how we shape that change. And that is a question no algorithm has the answer to.
Gerardine Schreurs
Communication & PR Entrepreneurial Venlo
E gerardine.schreurs@ondernemendvenlo.nl
T 06 53 68 78 54
