"The only thing we know for certain about Al is that we don't know exactly where we are going, but we are making great time." - Futurist Jim Carroll
My book Dancing in the Rain features a list of 30 Megatrends. Some folks asked me to expand on them, so I'm starting a new series today.
The first one, AI, obviously doesn't need a lot of explanation.
It's big.
It's fast.
It's not going away.
It's going to impact your life one way or the other.
It's going to have as profound an impact as the Internet has had, both good and bad.
People will endlessly debate about where it will take us.
Some are excited, many are terrified, many are both.
And the sophistication of what we can do continues to accelerate at a ridiculous rate.
As do the risks and the downside.
Ok, so with that out of the way, here's a bit more to think about. First, AI is not some weird futuristic concept - it's a pervasive reality that has already been rapidly transforming our world. I took the liberty of taking one of my recent AI keynotes and had it summarized by Google Gemini. I then fed this to gamma.app - and Megatrends#1 of how it summarized my work.
The first thing to think about is that from the seemingly mundane to the profoundly complex, AI is already deeply embedded in our daily lives. Take a look around your world - you have::
Wearable fitness trackers analyzing your exercise patterns
Chatbots that instantly answer your questions
Shopping sites recommending products based on your past purchases
Security cameras recognize unfamiliar faces or objects
Music apps creating personalized playlist recommendations
Email services categorize messages and filter spam
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. AI already powers everything around you, from autonomous vehicles and computer vision to natural language processing and virtual assistants. Algorithms are the unseen force behind Fitbits, Apple Health, Predictive Insurance, and just about everything else. In some industries - healthcare, for example - the 'algorithm' does a better job of interpreting critical data than humans do.
But that's not the key thing to think about - it's how quickly all of this is moving. It's the acceleration of everything having to do with AI that we need to think about. The explosion of AI into public consciousness isn't truly sudden. It's the result of several exponential trends converging:
Continuation of Moore's Law: The number of transistors on microchips doubles every two years, leading to ever-increasing processing power.
Collapsing Training Costs: The cost to train AI systems has plummeted dramatically. For example, the cost to train an AI system for image recognition dropped from $112.64 in 2017 to $4.50 in 2021. It's even less today.
It promises to change everything, and if we can adapt, learn, and responsibly innovate, THAT will determine our future in this rapidly evolving landscape.
As I said, we don't know where we are going but we sure are making great time!
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