In the late 90s, in the earliest days of the internet, Clifford Stoll was on a panel at the Fourth Street location of the legendary Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley. Stoll’s book, Silicon Snake Oil, was about the overhyping of the internet. My book, Cyberpower for Business, said that the internet had the power to transform business.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that Stoll got an awful lot right. Where we differed was on whether small and mid-sized businesses would use the internet at all. He didn’t think so because he said no small business would be willing to pay for the T1 phone line needed for a high-quality internet connection at the time.
Technological Solutions for Technological Problems
In 1997, a T1 line cost $1000 or more to install. It required additional modifications to handle internet traffic. Operating costs ran between $500 and $1000 per month.
Stoll was right that a T1 line was out of rational range for most businesses. What he missed was that technological innovation would make that fact irrelevant.
On one side, we found ways to make faster connections less expensive. DSL, cable broadband, and fiber brought connection costs down. On the other side, we found ways to do amazing things with limited bandwidth.
It took a while, but today most households and businesses use the web as part of daily life. They catch up with friends. They do business. They buy stuff. And they do it without any phone line at all.
That’s worth remembering when we try to project the future of artificial intelligence. The odds are pretty good that many of our current technological problems will turn out to have technological solutions.
Which ones? I have no idea. Surely, we’ll come up with ways to cut the cost of computing. I’ll bet we’ll continue to make AI easier to use. Those are guesses.
Three Revolutions
What I know is that we are at the very beginning of a very important change in the way we live our lives and conduct our business. It’s the third such change in my lifetime.
The technological advances in computers and communication that grew out of the Second World War and Claude Shannon’s information theory gave us efficient ways to communicate and connect to the world around us. I made my first telephone call on a phone that plugged into the wall. I told the operator what number I wanted. Our first television was black and white. It received two channels, both of which signed off at midnight.
The internet set off the next revolution. This was not just the advent of another way to use a computer. With my Commodore 64 and a 300-baud modem, I could search a database for articles and then download summaries. The web and hyperlinks made finding information easier. It wasn’t long until you could shop online, and after 2007 you could do it with your phone.
What’s Ahead for AI and Us?
Now we’re at the start of the artificial intelligence revolution. We don’t know exactly what it will bring. In fact, we can only be sure of three things.
The future will be different from today. Massive changes are likely, but there’s no way to predict them in detail. Technological change will be faster than social change.
Users will complete the innovation that is AI. We- you and I and our friends and people we will never meet will try things no one planned. Some of those things will work, and we’ll keep them and develop them. Some will not. The steel company, Nucor, offers an example.
Every Nucor plant has a storehouse for technology and equipment that just didn’t work. They often spark ideas for new and better things to try. Sometimes circumstances change, and an idea that wasn’t that good before becomes very good.
Nucor expects people to wander back to the storehouse from time to time, to look for good ideas among the bad. You can do the same thing. Every now and then, review your failures. You just might find some hidden treasure.
That’s our challenge. If we do it right, we will look back 25 or 30 years from now and be amazed at how different things are from the way they used to be. And we’ll be able to say, “We did it ourselves.”
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