Jul
13
What happens when you are in the middle of a revolution, but nothing radical appears to be happening? Richard Wal
ters, in an excellent article in the Financial Times (11 July 2024) speculates about the US tech bubble, and the potential for rapidly growing valuations to come into conflict with apparently little deployment of AI based products and services at scale. My friends and colleagues at Outsell reflect a trend by talking about AI and the hype cycle, with generative AI now moving from the peak of, inflated expectations into the trough of disillusion, presumably prior to ascending to the plateau of productivity. But we are still talking about AI everywhere and in everything, and personally, having experienced AI in previous guises as neural networks or as expert systems or as robotic process automation, I have to wonder if we are thinking about change in the right way.
What if change is not revolutionary, but osmotic? What if we should be thinking not about startling use cases but about the rate of general diffusion of AI everywhere? Is assimilation less transformative than step change? When I wrote recently about the applications of AI in Apple Intelligence, I realised of course that this is an announcement of a process that has been going on for many years and which will go on for many years: adding more utility progressively in each new release and iteration of existing software-based products and services. It’s not very exciting, is it? Even an Apple Press release could not make it sound revolutionary or radical. It certainly does not tune in nicely with the way in which stock markets work: This is not the sort of gold rush investment cycle that we seem to require in speculative terms. Yet it does seem to be what has happened in all of those other AI investment cycles since the 1980s. There have been disappointments on the way, of course. Think of Autonomy, once boosted as breakthrough technology, ending in endless disputes in the courts over whether its radical qualities had been misdescribed. There may well be disappointments of a similar sort in the future: some of the development programs of generative AI market leaders are “too expensive not to deliver “. Or at least, the companies concerned can never admit comparative failure. Again, there may be scale issues. Perhaps small learning models (SLM) will be more useful than the LLM research that enabled them. Perhaps AI in niches will be revolutionary (collating and reading test results in radiology and MRI scans) but related technologiesmake very, very slow progress towards universality (driverless cars). Whatever is the conclusion of history when all this is being reviewed, one thing, I suspect, will be clear. We would never have got anywhere without the huge concentration of investment in research, even if in retrospect we can see how much we wasted and how differently effects were from the intended benefits.
I do believe that we will look back in 2030 and see that fundamental, radical and far reaching change did take place in the mid 2020s. I think that if we compare 2020 with 2030 we will see that machine intelligence has transformed the way in which we live and work. But if we look at 2025 from 2024 and try to anticipate that change then I think we will see something different. We will see continuing slow progress with consumer applications led by companies like Apple, gradually enabling voice driven systems to free users from screens and keyboards and enable the more fluent and transparent use of technology. I also see that corporate of all types will gradually automate systems and services to create greater productivity, shed manpower, and understand users and markets with greater precision. The new products and services however may take longer. In the information, data and analysis marketplaces in which I have been most concerned for the past 55 years, we will see the gradual infusion of machine intelligence so surreptitiously that many of us will not notice what is happening. Make no mistake: from this point on we will all describe everything we do as “AI powered “or “AI based “, but that is simply the world of slogans. In truth the world will change, to coin a phrase, “not with a bang but a whisper! “