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Why AI Swallows Industries So Quickly — and What To Do About It
AI isn’t really a technology
When past technologies swallowed whole industries, they did so fairly slowly.
The car was invented in 1886. But the horse population didn’t peak and begin to decline until 1920. Likewise, the Wright Brothers first flew in 1903, but commercial aviation didn’t really come into its own until the 1960s.
Even the Internet enjoyed a fairly leisurely rollout. Early ISPs like AOL became widely available around 1990, yet by 2000 only about 50% of people had Internet access — and that’s just in North America.
The comparatively slow rollout of these world-changing technologies gave society time to react and adapt — sometimes a generation or more.
AI, on the other hand, is overturning industries and taking over massive parts of modern work orders of magnitude faster than previous transformative technologies.
That has huge implications for how AI’s rollout will impact society — and how us humans need to react.
ChatGPT Eats the World
ChatGPT is arguably the first truly powerful, widely-accessible AI technology available to everyday people. The tech launched in November of 2022.
