Personal Thoughts On The AI Revolution

The rise of AI and its facility in helping human beings become more productive is here to stay. That is my personal belief and one that, so far, seems to have held true and is only becoming truer. While there are certain elements and a reasonable amount of hype that may point to it being a “bubble” the fact is this type of reaction concerning new innovation has always been as we see it today.

Naysayers will label it the destruction of the world we know, the end of humanity’s role in our own destiny. While, at the other extreme, there will be those saying it is the beginning of a new age and is the sign of a complete revolution that will leave in its wake a new world that will be unrecognizable to those familiar with only the old world.

The truth is usually somewhere in the middle and usually disappointingly less dramatic. What generally happens with new innovations is that there is an initial spike in speculation, investment, exploration and application. After this initial wave of activity the general outcome is the incorporation of this new technology into the familiar repertoire of older technologies; almost as if the current of the zeitgeist has streamlined the new tech into the general background of human innovation.

This has been true historically with everything from the radio to the internet and the many iterations and offshoots of tech we’ve seen come and go in between. But, in the case of AI, we may be dealing with something entirely different. And this is due to the relationship between human intelligence and the already extant compute infrastructure that currently enmeshes the majority of the planet. This is where AI “lives” and an important part of what makes it so powerful: access.

The survival and popularity of past innovations have relied largely on two main factors 1) gains in productivity and efficiency that simply could not be ignored and 2) access to the particular innovation. A simple example would be how the continental U.S. was changed by the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. While largely localized and really not that impressive by today's commerce standards, it was at the time revolutionary and enabled transit of goods and people in timespans that would have been impossible previously. For the first time in history, people on one side of the country could have the same quality of life, for the most part, as people on the other side of the country simply because there was now a reliable way to ship things there. There had been created what was, in effect, a network to allow the flow of information and goods across the nation and on a schedule that was reliable and in a manner that was far safer.

Real innovation has a way of making changes like this. Changes that impact the infrastructure of how a society processes information and executes work; how that society gets things done. And what’s really interesting here is how one innovation lays the foundation for the next. We can see this very clearly in the path shown by the production of personal computers and mobile devices on the order of hundreds of millions of units which, in turn lays the foundation for the internet which lays the foundation for vast accumulation of information in the form of user data and output which is ultimately the fuel for AI.

What makes AI so particularly powerful is not just the raw access it has to the global compute infrastructure but, as it is trained to be more and more in tune with human consciousness and the modalities we use for useful work, how fast it can both produce results and improve upon them in an iterative way. It is an innovation that has the potential for recursive improvement. And humanity has never seen anything like this before.

Innovations before were necessarily limited by the constraints of of the speed of manufacture, the limit of available energy inputs, geographic distance and the inescapably and rather slow pace of mass adoption. With AI, however, the infrastructure for implementation is already present and useful applications with real world gains in productivity and efficiency are already widely possible, especially for those of us whose livelihoods involve working with a computer and/or the written word.

So, while the world as it is today is effectively ready to unleash AI, where is all the massive change so far? Personally, I believe we are still in the early stages of mass adoption and for good reason. While some industries are already seeing massive change and the resulting upheaval, software development being probably the most exemplary, others remain locked into the old way of doing things and are just now experimenting with how to use this new technology.

Popular consumer level applications like ChatGPT etc. have seen huge levels of adoption and, in some cases, are leveraged enormously in professional environments. But, as it is today, AI implementation in our world is only a fraction of what it is likely to be in the future. A future which may be nearer than many of us realize. Or, depending on how the governments of the world and their regulators choose to harness this storm of innovation, delayed somewhat as the result of a conscious choice to err on the side of caution.

What remains true however is that the potential gains in productivity and efficiency AI offers are simply too vast to ignore. This simple fact alone guarantees that implementation and adoption are bound to happen and in a very large way. So large, in fact, that I think AI will eventually become as ubiquitous as machine computation has become in our world today. It will effectively function as a layer upon which humanity work, innovates and develops just as we do today with the internet. And, given the fact of how quickly AI learns and improves in tandem with how creative and curious we are, I believe our work, innovation and development will see an acceleration that will likely make such periods in our history as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, despite their profound impact on humanity, seem like flashes in the pan in comparison to how much our world will be changed by AI.

Instead of trying to list what I think these changes will be, I will layout a different argument. If we assume the existence of a new technology capable of holding all of the information in the world, capable of understanding all of its technology, capable of holding all of this in context to answer questions and help design and develop new technologies that will in turn lead to further new innovations. Assuming we have this kind of technology, what questions will we not be able to answer? What problems will we not be able to solve? And what new technologies will we not be able to build? In this type of context, even the foundations of currency physics may be upturned to reveal new potentials and realities which we’d never been able to access.

Naturally, we are still in the early days of this new world. But, I think even from this vantage point, we can understand the potential of what it is we are on the verge of because it is becoming increasingly clear by the day.