Is AI Hype Justified?
* This post was almost exclusively written by me, a human. The only AI-generated content was some help summarizing Innis’s communication theory related to the printing press.
On LinkedIn, a friend of mine from the tech world recently asked if the hype around artificial intelligence is warranted. It’s a valid question, especially since we all just watched virtual reality fall flat and the spectacular rise and crash of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
So, how much is hype, and how much is legit “change the world”?
Canadian philosopher Harold Innis believed that the printing press was an inflection point for humanity. It allowed for the rapid and wide dissemination of information, which in turn led to the standardization of language, the spread of literacy, and the democratization of knowledge. It also facilitated the rise of nationalism and the nation-state by creating a shared culture and identity. The printing press drove its major changes over hundreds of years manifesting in things like modern democracy and the rights of individuals, and eventually whole new nations such as the United States with its Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
The internet, along with its child social media, is having a similar impact on how we live, organize, and see ourselves. The internet has taken forty years to mature to this point (happy 40th birthday internet!). In these few short decades, the internet has fundamentally changed how we live and work accelerating the world towards more globalization, changing ideas of self and state, and was the catalyst for social movements such as the Arab Spring, Me Too, and BLM that are changing norms in society.
Just like the printing press laid the foundation for the internet by democratizing knowledge and providing common language frameworks, the internet will facilitate the proliferation of AI by providing distribution, context, and utility. Hundreds of years to realize the impact of the printing press, decades to realize the impact of the internet, and now probably a few years to realize the impact of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has the real potential to be a transformational technology akin to the printing press and internet. Machines that can perform tasks normally requiring human thought combined with the distribution provided by the internet and the context of our own data give the technology the same utility to drive adoption disrupting how we live and organize ourselves while redefining the human experience.
AI is fundamentally different than recent much-hyped technologies like VR/Metaverse and crypto/NFTs. Virtual reality suffered because headsets ($1,000+ per hurts distribution), no matter how much one company (Meta) spent there wasn’t enough of a connection to people’s work or personal lives for it to be useful (little context), and therefore had a lack of utility. Crypto and NFTs had decent distribution but crypto couldn’t overcome its main competitor (state-issued currencies) losing out on practical applications, the context of NFTs was murky, and utility was deemed either fictional (NFTs) or sketchy (crypto) by too much of the population to reach critical adoption rates. Crypto still might mature into something, but it will take a lot of time for the sector to build trust, especially given its recent issues with those who control distribution (the exchanges).
One of the primary reasons for all the hype and attention from the press, governments, and boardrooms is the compressed timeline for AI adoption. The speed at which AI technologies are evolving means there are not sufficient guardrails in place to mitigate possible misuse or unintended outcomes. New transformative technologies do tend to create as many, or more, new types of jobs as jobs they make redundant, but it takes time for people to retrain and education institutions to adjust their curriculum. Large public institutions and businesses can only change and adapt to new ways of doing things so fast. They are governed by the cadence of human constraints such as careers, life cycles, and demographics as well as business processes. By maturing faster than humans and human-built organizations are designed to adapt to new inputs, AI promises a lot of friction with its emergence. The utility and economic incentives associated with this technology are so great that it could push through structural resistance to change.
AI has distribution through the internet, the context of our own data, and the utility of replacing everyday tasks and processes. History has yet to be written on how it will impact us, but AI has real promise to be one of the most disruptive and transformational technologies that humanity has developed. Innis believed new transformational technologies start at the edges of society and work towards the centre overthrowing existing authorities as they go. As exhausted as we all are from pandemic-driven social change, the pandemic might have been the first chapter in a decade of change for us as individuals, and as a collective.
