(I originally wrote this on LinkedIn. Resharing here 2 years later now I’m getting this going again..)
This isn’t a hype post. I’m not putting hastags on it or looking for shares.
It’s not about AGI or other religious debates. It just a self reflective post about how my beliefs have changed, written waiting on a plane.
After building a few things, seeing a few demos and listening to a lot of people I’m becoming convinced that we are dramatically underestimating the impact of AI.
I’ve lived through the rise of the personal computer, the internet, social networking, mobile and cloud.
I think it’s bigger than all of those things except perhaps the internet. By “the internet” I mean both the connection of all people on earth, the availablity of all information and the transition from industrial to information economics.
AI is going to reshape all work and all entertainment much more than cloud or social networking did.
One day someone will nail an AI native personal device and that’s going to eat mobile and computers, and that’s not even thinking about actually working broadly deployed consumer robots.
Maybe the internet is still bigger, but I’m not sure. If every single job in the world is changed is that bigger?
Hans Rosliing had a great Gapminder talk about how the washing machine is probably the most significant invention in industrial history because it freed up so much labour.
I can easily see that happening with AI. I’m a 10 times (maybe more) faster programmer on things I can use GPT4 on than things I can’t and I’ve seen similar things in other fields.
I’ve seen things that would have taken weeks of human effort by experts done in minutes with a higher quality and better affordances for how you interact with the output.
Obviously this isn’t a 1 or 2 year change - but in 15 years we’ll live in a different world in the same way 2009 was radically different to 1994.
We are 1 year in. ChatGPT is Mosaic and GPT4 is Netscape. The next 14 years will be exciting.
I don’t really know what to do with this information except to keep an open mind.
