It’s been a long time since my last post about technology, and in the meantime AI happened (again). It’s dominated the conversation, even beyond the tech crowd, since ChatGPT was released. Budgets and strategies at many companies have been massively disrupted echoing earlier booms and bubbles but adding its own unique attributes as well. I’ve got a number of things I’d like to share here and in the future, but I’ll start by saying I’m generally optimistic on this, especially long-term, for a few reasons:
It’s Exciting
I started my career in the “dot com boom”, when the Internet left universities and infiltrated almost every nook and cranny of the economy and people’s lives over the next 10-15 years. There were new developments daily, for years on end, even after the stock market blew up. Disruption and innovation was constant. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, even in the moment. Nobody expected it to last forever but nobody knew when it would end either.
The AI boom isn’t quite at the same level, but it’s closer than I thought I’d see again. There are new tools and techniques coming out very frequently. There are vast sums of money being invested in many areas. There are new skills to learn, new toys to tinker with, new styles of craft being developed.
One big difference is that during the Internet boom most of the money was going into people. Anyone remotely employable could get a job writing web pages that paid far more than anything else they could do. This time, far more of the money seems to be going into power and compute, in part because that’s an important part but also because there’s a pernicious fixation on automation and displacement rather than the focus on leverage that the Internet fostered. This makes it more of a high-stakes kind of excitement but it’s still excitement.
It’s Important
Since the Internet we’ve seen a number of hype cycles of all sizes offering varying combinations of transformation, enchantment and value. Mobile, social, crypto/blockchain, big data, voice assistants, IoT, VR, 3D printing, smart homes and so on. Most of these are durable but a generation from now they will all be distilled in a few turning points at a cultural level, and the rest will only be remembered as significant within specific industries. I think mobile & social have been truly transformative culturally; they’ve deeply affected politics, friendships, families, and communities. With that one exception I think all of the other trends could be eclipsed by AI’s impact on our lives, economies, and future.
The key vector for that statement is agency. And not in a buzzwordy “agentic” way, but in the sense that vibe coding a TODO app is a tiny taste of the direction things are going. More people are going to be able to do more things, and in a rare violation of deeply held beliefs, they’re going to be able to them better, cheaper and faster. Distributed agency is a massive threat/shift for a global economy that’s been shifting towards services for decades, and it’s going to be a bumpy ride but I think in the end it’s going to be a huge boon. Once more people start to really push boundaries and leave the routine work behind for the robots, we could see an improvement in innovation and new ideas.
This is where the “pernicious fixation on automation and displacement” I mentioned above seems short-sighted and wrong to me. If you have a tool that makes your employees more productive, and you choose to do the same thing with fewer employees, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re running your business properly, your employees should now be making you even more money, so why would you lay them off? I’m not saying this is a trivial change and of course there are lots of details and nuances, but I see far fewer people thinking about growing the metaphorical pie than those who think it’s a fixed size.
It’s Inevitable
This is not the “use AI or become obsolete” pitch that many are making, but more about the fact that it’s here to stay. While the latest and greatest models require billion and trillion dollar companies, the trailing edge of self-hosted/open-source models and systems is keeping up at an impressive pace. Even if OpenAI and Google and Anthropic disappeared tomorrow, we’d still have a large fraction of the capabilities available to us.
“This is the worst it will ever be” is a mantra you might hear from AI fans and I think it’s mostly true. LLMs and RAG and “agents” and whatever FotM we’re excited about now may not be relevant in 10 or 20 years but the thing that will exist will almost certainly be better. We don’t have to use it, and we don’t even have to like it, but we can’t ignore it. If you work with any kind of information and are anywhere but the very end of your career, you should have a plan that addresses, if not includes, AI.
It’s Interesting
Finally, it’s personally relevant to me because it’s just something I think about a lot. Suck.com’s “shiny vs. useful” chart is one I come back to again and again, and AI is both. Not Sun/fire level but still very positive on both of those axes. The fact that it has a huge overlap on my own work in software and tech, and the points I made above, mean this is just too good of a topic to not geek out on. I hope to share more thoughts here in the future on both the positive and negative aspects.
