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Comparing Two Tech Revolutions
What the Internet's consequences can teach us about post-AI society
Jeff LaPorte
October 31, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes
Hello readers!
I want to say a few things about my goals and impetus for launching the Road to Artificia.
(If you want to just skip to the article, click here)
To start - thanks to all of you who have subscribed ahead of this first issue, I really appreciate your support! Almost all of you so far know me already from some interaction in the past.
First, having been deep in AI/ML tech since about 2016, I've observed a lot about the discussions both within the AI community and outside of it. I'm interested in trying to discover the principles of society post-AI. What does that mean? Well, this period is fraught because nearly everything is up for grabs. We're all privileged to live in a time where we will participate in changes as momentous as the enlightenment, the industrial revolution. But to absorb these changes we need to be able to anticipate them as much as possible.
So the first goal is to be a place where I can publish ideas on discovering the principles of society post-AI, and to test and grow them together with my readers.
Second, I have conversations with a lot of people about AI, both non-technical and technical. Despite all the noise about AI in many channels, information about AI is flowing very slowly and imperfectly from the AI community to the non-technical community at large. Before setting out to launch this newsletter, I took a sample from a number of smart, non-technical leaders in various roles and industries. What I found is that most leaders in organizations know and have used ChatGPT, and know AI is important, but are fairly unsure how to take the next steps to level up their knowledge of AI. Meanwhile things are racing ahead week by week.
So the second goal is to help leaders in organizations to advance their understanding of AI faster, and to benefit from that.
So those are the goals for this newsletter. On how to fulfill them, I have an initial approach but hope to learn rapidly from all of you to quickly adapt that approach, and create something that can offer as much value as possible. As such, I will ask for your feedback often!
The initial formula for the Road to Artificia is:
• 4 issues weekly
• One "Idea" or "think" piece per week, and
• Three "Briefs" issues where I provide updates and short commentary on important recent events
I may tweak this mix as we go, based on reader feedback and other factors.
Ok, enough formalities.
On to the first issue.
AI & Society
Tech revolutions, then and now
What the Internet's consequences can teach us about AI
It's been said that if the powers that be had understood how the Internet would change society they never would have allowed it.
But they lacked understanding not because the changes were being concealed from them - there were plenty of voices making bold predictions for the web. But leaders in business and government dismissed most of it as fanciful, and the web as a toy.
And although the theorists got certain things right — democratization of publishing for example — the second-order effects of the Internet and the web were too complex to see. The Internet started small, among programmers with few resources, and ended up enabling a generation of founders who learned how software could be leveraged to beat industry incumbents on their own turf. And so the Internet looked harmless and on the fringes of society and the economy until, over the last three decades, it has eaten increasingly large chunks of the economy and transformed social relations.
AI is starting out differently. It's arriving through online services powered by the new incumbents - the companies that won their positions of power on the Internet. Building AI is taking absolutely enormous capex, with scale far beyond the wildest dreams of the early Internet years.
This time around - the powers that be in government and the economy at large are aware of the technology, and at least partly aware of the changes that are coming. Not least because those in the AI field are working very hard to inform them.
In the case of the Internet, in hindsight, the drivers of the changes brought on by the web are much clearer. As technology enabled the digitization of more and more sectors of the economy, more and more goods and services became zero marginal cost to deliver. This change to pricing is at the heart of most of the changes.
Now, incredibly, tasks requiring intelligence are going to zero marginal cost. Again, it's a change to pricing that mediates the effects. The trick then is to try to see the second and higher-order effects. All the predictions going on right now are grasping at this.
The Other Great Stagnation, and its Solution
The idea that we've been in a period of technological stagnation since about 1970 started to be debated openly in 2011, when Peter Thiel published "What Happened to the Future"1 . Although controversial at the time, today the thesis is widely accepted, in large measure because the last several years have begun to show signs of an exit from the period.
the tech stagnation thesis, restated (source unknown)
Reusable space launch, solar photovoltaics, rapid mRNA vaccine development, global connectivity via satellite mega-constellations, small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
But there's another stagnation that was stagnating before it was cool - the stagnation of the service economy. Health, education, legal services, the justice system - broadly, the labour-based services industries.