AI Automation Overhype
I recently came across articles which mentions that "AI is overhyped", "with many applications not ready for prime time", "AI applications are never going to be cost-efficient, are never going to actually work right, will take up too much energy, or will prove to be untrustworthy.", or people used ChatGPT only once or twice and never went back to it.
Our position is that AI is clearly one of the most transformative technologies for mankind - and will rank on par with innovations like domestication of animals, knowledge of agriculture, control over fire, control over electricity, the industrial revolution and creation of a computer. Why? Because it provides you the basis to do so much more than what can be done today, and what can even be thought today.
Clearly such articles are clickbait and do not scratch under the surface, or provide just comments from market observers talking from a financial sense, not technology operators or actual users. Today in 2024 we are where we were in IT in 1995 - the hype phase where people were investing without thinking on a dotcom company - whether it had a business plan or not. Nvidia recently became the world's most valuable company with a market cap exceeding $3 Trillion, and its stock has been falling since then for the last 2 months, prompting articles like this. But let us dig under the surface of what is possible due to AI.
In the 1980s, it was not clear whether hardware would win or software. IBM used to be a domineering company, and most industry wizards believed that hardware was where the real value is at. But we have since seen the commoditization and miniaturization of hardware. Computers used to be housed in buildings, then became smaller and fit into rooms, then enterprises started to use it for business, slowly people started using them in homes. Today we carry them in our pockets and have started to wear them. The trend took 45 years but has changed the world.
AI is a revolution in software. Even today software is coded the way IBM mainframes used to be coded - ofcourse there have been marginal improvements - from low level languages, to high level languages, and much better algorithms - but still till 2022 most software used in the world was a marginal improvement over the software used 50 years now. AI has ushered in a disruption - the real change is that software can now be used to take decisions and software can now be used to write software. What will be the consequences of this? We need not wait 45 years for this one!
Please do not forget that AI employees are around the corner - and AI will disrupt the automaton that drives the global economy! Regardless of whether this happens in two years or five, humans will be having a much different life within 20 years. AI will manage tasks executed by other AI, and will earn for humans. Humanity will enter a world of sufficiency - atleast - the only need is the democratization of the technology. AI Automation ideas which today cannot be easily thought, will be commonplace in 20 years. What would you be thinking when you revisit these articles in ten years?
