AI is Water

Photo by vackground.com on Unsplash

You can say you heard it here first. The analogy of water to AI is very apt. AI is a core infrastructure innovation that will rarely, if ever, be seen but will be felt everywhere. Let us walk you through this analogy.

Ubiquity

• Water is everywhere in the world and in our bodies. It predominates our life. Without it there is no life, hence the keen interest in trying to find water on Mars. Water is everywhere.
• AI will have the same ubiquity as water. You will not notice it because AI will be in everything and anything that performs a decision. Shortly, any startup that calls AI out as a differentiator will be derided.

Essential

• The value of AI goes without saying. The use of AI will be a short-term competitive tool and a long-term table stake. Right now, we saw a spike of investing in the infrastructure of AI, but this will be short lived and won by the largest few, the FAANG’s, replacing Netflix with Nvidia.
• We are already seeing the race of every startup and tech company to not just leverage AI, but to promote it. The winners here are the infrastructure companies like Microsoft and Google, who are monetizing their AI services to a wide technological industry.

Commoditized

• Water infrastructure quickly moved from private markets to public infrastructure. It was deemed so essential that the government took ownership of the systems and continued to build.

Downsides

• By 1804, scientists were discovering that water transported pathogens that greatly harmed the citizenry. Foul water was seriously much more harmful than scarce water. By 1855, scientists had determined that cholera was a water borne disease.
• We are already seeing the negative effects of AI. As with the advent of the internet, the early adopters were the dark side of society, be it porn or crime. We have yet to fully appreciate the power of AI in the wrong hands.

Self Regulation — Treatment and Control

• Unfortunately, it was not until 1904 that cities began treating their water. Jersey City was the first to add chlorine to their water.¹
• We are seeing the infrastructure players already take steps to “secure” and “clean” their data to protect the larger citizenry. This is particularly critical in content generation where the ability to generate real “fakes” is terribly alarming and destructive to the creative industry as well as seriously misleading to an unsuspecting audience. If you think the 2016 fake election communications were damaging, we have no idea what this capability will bring forth. Consequently, Facebook took the first step in labeling AI generated content so that readers are fully aware.

Federal Regulation

• The first US government regulation of water was initiated in 1914 by the US Public Health service, fully 250 years after the first water works were developed in Boston in 1652 (to fight fires) and innovated on by Philadelphia in 1804, with cast iron pipes to move water through their system.¹
• We will see the Federal Government wake up to the challenges of this power and seek to regulate it. That said, the lack of technical understanding in our Congress greatly hampers the ability of our leaders to proactively regulate this tech. It will take significantly nefarious activity to activate our leadership (think the MADD movement, Child Protection laws, etc).

¹IWA Publishing: A Brief History of Water and Health from Ancient Civilizations to Modern Times