President's Message

Artificial Intelligence – How should we approach it?

by - Thomas Twombly

artist - Daisy Lopez

As I sit down to write this on the final day of June 2023, I’ve just deleted an email that arrived in my inbox this morning with the subject line: “Master AI or Be Destroyed by it.”

It’s one of hundreds of similar messages that have flooded in this year as the media, and certainly marketers of every stripe, have sought to “disturb” us into a heightened state of anxiety so as to prompt a knee-jerk reaction to do something – read a story, click a link, buy a product, invest in a start-up tech company, or quiver in abject fear that dark AI overlords will soon have dominion over all our livelihoods.

I suspect everyone reading this has had at least one similar experience over the last six months. And I don’t believe these efforts to gin up anxiety, fear, or speculative investment hype are going to go away any time soon. Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in, so I thought perhaps a thoughtful counter-balancing message of some type might be in order.

Now, I am no AI expert. Like some of you, perhaps, I’ve recently begun my own exploration into understanding both the opportunities and the risks these new technological developments present to my business life and to my personal life, and to the lives of the people we care about and serve.

I’m certain this exploration will be a long and winding road, as The Beatles once sang, with the possibility for all manner of exciting discoveries, developments and profitable investments around every bend, and the potential for fearsome challenges, mistakes, and setbacks as well. It’s a new frontier.

As a result, and just like the multi-day canoe trips I like to take into wild and remote places with my trusted group of “Plan B Paddlers”, it’s very important to get prepared, and to think carefully and deliberately in advance about how you will and won’t respond to either of those eventualities – so you’re not provoked into regrettable and reflexive decisions by something that took you by complete surprise. In other words, clearly defined principles count. So do thoughtful policies and procedures.

I have encouraged everyone in this firm to be curious, and to devote time to learning about and thoughtfully exploring this subject matter in as many ways as possible – and then to share those insights and knowledge with each other. But I’ve also stressed the need to be careful and skeptical, and to be mindful of the old adage that “you can always spot the pioneers, they’re the ones face down in the dirt with arrows in their backs.”

The future we invest in and for is unknown and unknowable. It always has been, and it always will be. As investors and as human beings we’re constantly challenged to embrace that ambiguity, and then to move forward with as much care and forethought as possible. Early this month we engaged an outside expert to come in and meet with us for an entire afternoon, and to share his insights and experience with Generative AI, such as Chat GPT and Google Bard. We talked at length about how quickly and decisively the most recently released version of Chat GPT has surpassed the version that was released only last fall. It truly is exciting to see, and it’s mind-expanding to ponder the ways in which new technology may improve productivity and efficiency with all kinds of routine tasks.

But we also spent a great deal of time discussing the risks and limitations of this technology, the fact that plenty of people are plunging into it without considering the importance of developing clearly defined principles for how it should be used and how it shouldn’t be used, and the fact that people with nefarious intent are also gaining access to new tools and abilities that can help them deceive and manipulate others much more efficiently and effectively as well.

It’s clear that much will change over the coming years. It’s also clear that we’re not far enough along in our exploratory journey yet to be able to fully define the ways in which we as a firm may find valuable uses for these new tools, or how those uses might improve our services to you, but we will remain curious, and we will keep you informed as we move forward.

 That said, it’s important to reiterate what will not be changing here at this firm. We have always had very strict policies and procedures concerning privacy and cyber-security issues, and we all take them extremely seriously. That vigilance will continue, and there is no doubt that these policies will be strengthened and improved periodically in response to evolving technologies and potential threats.

We recognize that those policies may seem inconvenient – to you and to us - at times, but we also know they are a critical part of being good stewards and fiduciaries of our clients’ best interests. In the past, it has proven to be a frustration for certain individuals that we have maintained a strict policy of never acting on emailed instructions to move money or to change an address of any kind (physical or email) without first making sure we have verified that it is truly you by speaking on the telephone. That will certainly continue, and we hope you understand.

What also will not change is that we will continue to deliberately limit ourselves to working closely with a manageable number of clients who we get to know well, and with whom we maintain deep relationships of trust. That alone makes it much more likely that we can all work closely to detect nefarious actors, and also to grow, learn and adapt to this rapidly changing environment together.

Thank you again for your confidence and trust.

Thomas G. Twombly

President