The A.I.-Robotic Chain-Reaction: A.I.-Native products break down barriers, make the future simpler and more fun, and enable more people to live better lives
The Internet Revolution had a huge impact on the world. Yet in its early days, many incumbents saw the Web as hardly relevant, or at best as a tool to make existing products marginally more efficient.
Visionary entrepreneurs, however, realized the Internet’s unique advantages and created Internet-Native products with disruptive new business models, which removed significant costs and complexities that stood in the way of people fulfilling critical needs and getting important jobs done.
Internet-Native products, e.g. reduced costs by increasing capital efficiency and economies of scale, and by eliminating physical outlets, local inventories, and layers of middlemen. They enabled more efficient R&D through direct feedback loops, A/B testing, etc. And they offered unrivaled convenience, relevance, choice, customization, and 24/7-availability.
In this way, Internet-Native businesses empowered many more people (beyond the rich, educated elites) to use their products, which in turn allowed them to transform market niches into new markets of unprecedented size, create new jobs, and grow small ventures into huge companies.
And while new technologies always come with benefits and burdens, most ‘connected’ societies gained more from the Internet Revolution than it cost them, and to such a degree that ‘closing the digital divide’ within countries and around the world has become an economic and humanitarian mission for many governments and foundations.
What comes next is much, much bigger
While the Internet Revolution has been dramatic, it was still constrained by limited hardware, software, and data: dedicated servers, serial processing, programmed software, desktops, keyboards, screens, user-input data, etc.
These constraints are obliterated in a self-reinforcing technological explosion.
Dedicated servers are giving way to vast, shared Clouds, and serial- to parallel-processing via GPUs, TPUs, Qbits. Programmed software is enhanced and replaced by self-learning Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), desktops by Artificial Bodies (A.B.) of every form and shape: Smartphones, IoT, robots, drones, avatars, bionic body parts, etc. Keyboards and screens give way to connected Sensors, from full-spectrum audio-visual, to bio-chemical, to haptic, and to intuitive Interfaces, such as Natural Language, VR/AR, touch, clothing, implants, etc. And user-input, limited data are superseded by ubiquitous, automatically-generated data…
A.I.-Native Products
With so many powerful trends reinforcing each other, the A.I./Robotics Revolution is well on its way! Yet as before, many incumbents consider even this vastly greater set of capabilities as irrelevant, ‘just a fad’, or another tool for marginal efficiency gains sustaining their existing products.
Yet, combining self-learning ‘Artificial Minds’ with sensing, acting ‘Artificial Bodies’ creates a powerful chain-reaction — making both ever-more capable and ever-more pervasive. ‘A.I.-Native’ products, as I call them, will deploy these ever-expanding forces in new disruptive businesses.
(Have you played Pokemon Go? It’s our story: A.I. plus 1st-generation Sensors — camera, GPS, accelerometer. Imagine when phones and robots get 3D-vision next…)
A.I.-Native products will reduce labor costs by shouldering highly repetitive tasks and replacing expensive, hard to come by ‘experts’. Yet more importantly, they will make R&D and process optimization vastly more efficient, and boost techno-scientific and product evolution by making sense of messy data and complex, multi-variable, non-linear dynamic systems.
A.I.-Native products will increase convenience for consumers even more and in many more areas, via ever-more precise personalization, anticipation and proactive fulfillment of needs, and through ubiquitous Sensors and intuitive Interfaces. And they will help to rid ourselves of some of the worst abuses and so-called ‘externalities’ the world still faces today: injuries, disabilities and deaths, environmental disasters and degradation — caused by human error, and poorly designed processes and product life-cycles.
Bringing all those benefits with them, A.I.-Native products will move beyond desktops and smartphones into our factories, hospitals, schools and homes, into our vehicles, boats, planes and rockets, even into realms hardly accessible to us before, from deep seas to the oceans, from orbits to deep space.
And wherever they go, they will break down barriers, and remove costs and complexities in almost every industry, from manufacturing to mobility and transportation, to commerce, finance and trading, to healthcare, law, agriculture, energy, mining, aerospace, defense, entertainment, education, nursing, care, and beyond.
A.I.-Native products will empower vastly more people around the globe to fulfill their needs and get their jobs done. They will enable humanity to overcome many fundamental scarcities and limitation. As a result, A.I.-Native ventures will grow into companies that will make even the winners of the Internet Revolution look small by comparison.
A.I.-Native products will create countless new work opportunities, while almost 50% of today’s jobs will be lost to automation in the next 10–20 years (Oxford University), a displacement comparable in scale only to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution — but much more rapidly. This will put enormous pressure on the flexibility of individuals and labor markets, and the intelligence and effectiveness of communities and governments.
And as for ‘A.I.-Armageddon’, the destruction or enslavement of humanity by super-human artificial intelligence — we’ll need to be watchful and evolve with our creations. But in many ways humans have always been parents to their technologies, as well as their children.
