Trunk Economics | December 10, 2024The AI
Arms Race
How the World is Changing– Until It Isn’t
Scientific inventions, world history tells us, have been about solving fundamental problems. Think of the printing press. Think of the industrial revolution. Think of the steam engine. Think of the Wright Brothers. Think of the Internet.
The printing press transformed the knowledge economy in a deeply fundamental way. It democratized information and insights by making these widely accessible, and shareable, to a far wider audience. The industrial revolution brought goods production from homes to factories, at a scale previously unimaginable. The steam engine dramatically altered the transportation industry. The Wright Brothers demonstrated that humans could fly, after all. Distances suddenly appeared shorter.
The Internet and world wide web ushered previously unthinkable changes in the world of communication. Everything changed along with. The world of banking and finance, for instance, changed forever. As also the world of retail, content, healthcare, and everything imaginable and tangible. As the size of the computers evolved from big machines to micro-chips, so did the power of computing.
In most of these the sheer audacity to think about the unthinkable has led to these innovations solving elemental problems for humanity. And now, by all measures, we are well and truly entering the mid-morning of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era.
We are collecting way more data than we know what to do with. The resultant AI-imperialism can potentially change the world order, fundamentally, without actually solving too much of a fundamental problem for humanity.
AI: A fundamental question
This brings us to a more fundamental a priori question: What is the fundamental problem that AI is going to solve for humanity, much in the same manner that the printing press, the steam engine, and the airplane?
Which is why it may be perhaps the right time to dust up the thought-provoking 2005 paper by Jonathan Huebner A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.
Huebner seeks to rummage through the Silicon Valley’s screamer headlines on innovation and addresses the elephant in the room: is the pace of innovation actually slowing down.
Sounds counterintuitive, right? After all, we are living in an era of exponential tech advancements. But, according to Huebner the rate of innovation might have peaked in 1873 and has been rapidly declining ever since, despite the massive advancements in scientific education and project execution.
Huebner, of course, places the disclaimer upfront that it is about innovation per capita, not absolute innovation. Essentially, it's not about the total number of innovations, but rather the number of innovations relative to the global population.
Sample this: despite our impressive technological advancements, we haven't returned to the moon since 1969. Going back is no trivial feat, and does this point towards a concerning collapse in our collective capacity to coordinate complex, technical megaprojects?
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s investment firm, Founders Fund, used to throw some serious shade at the tech industry with its manifesto: "We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters" (yes, that's a Twitter burn). Today, the message is even more concise: "What happened to the future?" Thiel called out the industry for obsessing over social media instead of pushing the boundaries of innovation.
Scientific inventions, world history tells us, have been about solving fundamental problems…. A more fundamental a priori question appears before us. What fundamental problem is artificial intelligence going to solve for humanity, much in the same manner that the printing press, the steam engine, and the airplane?
Ctrl+All+Data
But one thing's for sure: we are collecting way more data than we know what to do with. The global AI arms race of sorts is, perhaps, a manifestation of the zeal to make sense of, and eventually control, the data that is drowning us. The resultant AI-imperialism can potentially change the world order, fundamentally, without actually solving too much of a fundamental problem for humanity.
This transformation in the world order, those who are in control of our data, could, dare we say, play out very similarly to Mike, a character in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, who when asked about how he went bankrupt says: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly”.
Sample this: despite our impressive technological advancements, we haven't returned to the moon since 1969. Going back is no trivial feat, and does this point towards a concerning collapse in our collective capacity to coordinate complex, technical megaprojects?
TAGS: #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Data #Innovation #Invention #Change #SocialMedia #Internet #Imperialism
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