History suggests that societies generally overestimate the short-term implications of new technologies while underestimating longer-term ones. Current experience with artificial intelligence – the technology enabled by machine-learning – suggests we are getting it the other way round this time. There’s too much talk about the putative “existential risk” to humanity posed by AI, and too little about our experience of it so far and corporate plans for exploiting the technology.
Although AI has been hiding in plain sight for a decade, it took most people by surprise. The appearance of ChatGPT last November signalled that the world had stumbled upon a powerful new technology. Not for nothing is this new “generative AI” called “foundational”: it provides the base on which the next wave of digital innovation will be built.
