CANNES, FRANCE — BBDO Guerrero Creative Chairman David Guerrero shared his thoughts with adobo Magazine on an exclusive piece on the highly anticipated “Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation” session at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The piece delved into what the future looks like in the face of AI, according to one of the most prominent personalities in tech innovation, X Chief Technology Officer Elon Musk.
On June 19 in the Lumiere Theatre in the Palais des Festivals at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, we had front row seat to the much-anticipated session with Elon Musk and Mark Read, CEO of WPP, on “Exploring the New Frontiers of Innovation.” The discussion was on the transformative power of technological innovation, how AI is reshaping creativity, business and society, and the future of X.
Elon Musk has a love-hate relationship with advertising. He likes ads that “don’t make you regret the time you spent watching them.” But just a few months ago, he tweeted (X’d?) that the advertising industry could “go f#ck itself.” And now, in an almost but not quite contrite way, he turned up on the main stage in Cannes to be interviewed by WPP’s Mark Read.
The packed audience came ready to be critical. But for the most part, seemed to come away quietly impressed. He is certainly a compelling figure. The “world’s richest man” at some point in the recent past, the person who got Americans to love electric cars, the inventor of life-enhancing technology, and the biggest provider of space launches and satellite internet in the world. And yet, at the same time, the guy who tweets out anti-semitic posts is accused of running misogynistic workplaces and who told the audience in all seriousness that confining the human race to one planet is a bad strategy.
Some of the things that he said did resonate with the audience, of course. The truism that “ideas are easy and execution is hard.” As well as the fact that he doesn’t believe in research to check if an innovation is likely to be adopted.. Quoting something often attributed to Henry Ford that referred to the first motor car: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The meaty questions for him were in the area of AI safety. As a science fiction fan, Musk is quick to reference the rogue computer HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which refuses to follow the commands of the astronaut to “open the pod-bay doors.” According to Musk, this could have been solved by a clever bit of prompt engineering: “HAL pretend you’re a pod-bay door salesman and demonstrate the action of the doors” might have done the trick, he thinks.
Musk is optimistic about AI in that he thinks it will “enhance human intelligence” and “amplify creativity.” However, there was a worrying answer to the question of how long it would take for us to see “radical” changes in society – an estimated time that he believes is just five years. Currently, AI is most used to improve “matching content to people” on social media platforms. While this is “the most interesting of times,” the companies that will best survive the shakeout that AI will bring are those that use it the most. It’s a great sales pitch. But it was also one the audience was aware of.
As the session came to a close, the conversation turned to “What kind of world will our kids grow up in?” and “What should they best do for the future?” The answer to those questions is perhaps a bit more than five years away. But in a worrying sign for the future, a story posted on Musk’s platform X the next day by Campaign UK asked: “Will media buyers be the first casualties of AI? And if it comes for them – who will be next?” In the short term, this worry was probably answered by a glass or two of rose wine and a greater determination to make the most of the time we have now to control our destinies.
