AI is Here to Stay

Throughout my life, I have witnessed many technological trends come and go. Nevertheless, this time, I am convinced that the acceleration of recent developments in artificial intelligence and the lowering of barriers to entry will usher in a new era of innovation and entrepreneurship that will reshape the world as we know it.

I am almost 36 years old now, and very pragmatic and skeptical when it comes to adopting new technology. I am not active on social media and don’t even have a Facebook account. I have never used, and am not sure if I understand, platforms like Snap or TikTok. I used to be an early adopter in my teens, but over time I lost the fear of missing out and learned to appreciate tools for their outcomes, not their allure.

Perhaps this is because in my short lifespan, I’ve seen many tech waves come and go. Some have been transformational, like the iPhone, while others promised to change the world forever but quickly faded away, like NFTs or VR.

However, this time around, with all the developments in the world of artificial intelligence, I feel that the impact will be both different and truly transformational.

The idea of AGI is something that has come and gone many times, and it’s a topic that has interested me for a long time. Its implications on different layers, such as privacy, job automation, creativity, and overall societal transformation, have the potential to change the world as we know it.

Why I think that’s the case?

  • The acceleration of AI developments is starting to reveal a truly exponential growth. There was a time when between product breakthroughs we’d had to “wait” years. Now this is coming down to months, even days. This means that the pace of innovation is likely to increase at an unprecedented rate, with new products being developed and released at an ever-increasing speed.
  • Recent layoffs have left thousands of tech-minded people unemployed, probably seeking to start new venture.
  • What these AI-enabled tools do, among many other things, is to lower the barrier of entry — in terms of skills, capital requirements, and human resources — to create a new product. For example, starting from scratch and recreating any existing product today, might cost several orders of magnitude less and scaling could not even require deep technical chops.

For the first time, by leveraging AI’s capabilities and offloading some tasks where it clearly outperforms humans, I believe we’re on the verge of the renaissance man, a solo founder of the modern era.

However, despite the fact that we often make stupid societal decisions, progress is generally making the world a better place. But as good as an AI-driven scenario could get, the potential for negative outcomes of such God-like technology, if poorly managed, can lead to a “game over” of sorts.

Because of this, I’ve decided that I want to spend more time around this technology, get my hands dirty with it, blog about its possible applications and dangers, share its latest developments, and create some AI-enabled products or tools that could amplify our human nature, cognition, expand our capabilities, and above all, make the world a better place.

First published on April 12, 2023