In November 1995, Fresh out from Engineering College, in my first job at one of the large Indian MNCs, I was posted in the power projects' subsidiary when I was trained along with another colleague of mine to send an email. Yes, trained for sending an email and we two were the chosen ones. Today that skill can't be even mentioned in my resume out of embarassment.
Year 2001, the dot com boom coincided its bust with 9/11. My three quarters' incentives were owing to sale of Sun Microsystems' servers that I achieved while everybody was busy building a website and stitch together a business model around it and speculate massive valuations around it. There was a major hype around how internet was going to change everything at the pace no one could envisage. The only thing tangible, initially those billions of dollars' investment leading to the dot com boom and then bust gave to the civilization was making every office "EMAIL" ready, overnight. And thereafter forever "No" training was required to send an email.
Year 2008, Subprime crisis had disrupted the financial markets directly, and indirectly the economic prosperity in the short term. The result was technology innovation and consolidation. We saw the rise of cloud computing and hosting as a mainstream stay immediately after the crisis. Nobody thereafter needed an IT administrater, nor did people buy servers for their captive server rooms ever after.
Year 2020, Covid hit us the way no human mind could handle. Even the word disruption has an order about it but covid did not have any. With every passing day the humanity would discover one more thing that hit it that day. However, once we survived Covid, the overnight transformation was the acceptance of "online video meetings" both for business as well as personal. Though the video meeting tools existed decades before that.
So any boom or bust eventually leads to a massive macro consolidation. It doesnt however, pave ways for humanity as it is forecasted at that point in time but definitely creates a next "stepped up" pedestal for the economy and societies to evolve further.
Looking at a WhatsApp we must feel embarrassed if not ashamed as to how we used pigeons followed by horses and then letters and then telegrams to merely pass on a message. All of them were such collosal waste of Time, money and effort to get a message across. What has whatsapp done? leveraging on the consolidation of Email, Cloud computing and video meeting tools one one hand and simplifying, amplifying and multiplying at scale and with speed, all the tasks at back end to provide for exchange of messages instantly between the sender and receiver through a simple user interface.
AI is the ecosystem which consolidates intelligence at the back end, simplifies complexities of the ask by the user through algorithms (LLMs) and renders at speed, scale through a simple user interface of a mobile (today, may change later) at the hands of a user, anytime and anywhere.
The phobia around AI is real and imminent but it is for people who still want to mention email sending skills in thier resumes. For people who want to mention their typing speed or coding skills in their resumes. Massive conslidation is happening at breathtaking pace across domains to increase the physical infrastructure, power infrastructure, compute power, aggregate and consolidate intelligence and offer the solution at speed and scale. For people who are willing to adopt it is a real take-off for them towards greater heights.
What will happen to AI in the near future?
With the hype around AI, many issues are cropping up. Lets look at some of these issues.
1. Too Much Capital deployed, too soon: That is bad, if not scary. This puts tremendous pressure on the innovators leading to scarcity one one hand and strains other dimensions of economy with lack of capital. As a result of it many things in the myopic view of innovators would be delivered but they wont survive the test of time. Too much hype and pressure to deliver would also lead to gross wastage of resources, massive jobs losses even in areas where they are required and untenable innovations leading to a downward spiral of overall economy called a recession. And believe me, its coming.
2. A good thing about access to too much capital is that it would eventually lead to some sustainable innovations initially, on which the next set of ecosystems will be built to make it another step up pedestal for the economy and society. We have to wait and see what will this wave give the humanity like the email, cloud computing and video meetings respectively gave in the last three cycles.
3. Safeguards for AI: This is the most important aspect that the governments have to look at. While the first casuality of technology is Geography the outer limit of regulation is geography. So how are we going to protect our people legally, have a redressal mechanism and the laws to protect would have to be frammed uniformly and globally to protect the plausibility of many demons, otherwise may be unleashed. The data privacy and data soveregnity is another major issue which would need policy and penal level safeguards.
4. Political implications: Creating false narrative would become easy and Countering those Narratives will become very critical and detrimental to nations and societies. the bigger economic powers would dictate the terms for the superimposing narratives which may not be democratic.
5. Job Losses: The job losses would be short term. Hoever, there eventually would be multiple fold jump in job opportunities in almost every aspect of economy. yes we may not have jobs for coders but we would have enough jobs for creators, original thinkers, last mile delivery of high end products and services and so on and so forth.
6. Cost of Servicing would go down drastically, initially and the adoption will reach unimaginable scales. This would however initially put pressures on the viability of the capital costs and even in near term the oerational costs incurred at delivering these services. This may also lead to a collapse of AI in the short term and they way it is envisaged as of today. But eventually, as the floor efficiencies improve coupled with rapid adoption and scale, there would be an optimum balancing that would be found out to make this sustainable. This is were governments would play major role by way of financing and also regulating and controlling.
The term AI is new but the philosophy behind AI is perpetual. its humanity's quest to evolve continuously and AI is one major step in that direction. The humanity would progress till such time that the inefficiencis in the value chain are eliminated. Also every step up innovation scales up the next step of innovation in terms of impact and scale and so AI impact would be BIGGEST so far that the humanity has seen and is here to become a mainstay.
