Part 2
Amara’s Law:
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run” – Roy Amara, Futurist
I tend to remind myself of this statement when evaluating AI..
Overestimate the short-term effects
I see a lot of articles about how AI will revolutionise everything in the next few years, making the mistake of the first part of Amara’s Law. Part of the issue is just that no matter how capable the technology is that people, organisations, and behaviours don’t change as quickly.
“Even if AI development stopped today, we would have years of change ahead of us integrating these systems into our world.” – Ethan Mollick, Professor and AI researcher.
I am more inclined to agree with Ethan Mollick. The cultural, organisation, and societal changes related to AI are going to take much longer than I think most predictions state. The initial changes with AI are going to be small and incremental, regardless of how revolutionary the technology might be. Organisations move slower than the rapid pace of technological change. The technology is continuing to improve as well, and is going to take longer for the cultural changes to happen.
Underestimating the long-term effects
I think the opinions that everything AI is garbage and a passing fad that will vanish in another year or two miss the second half of Amara’s Law. To be clear: a lot of what people produce with AI is garbage. We’ve probably all seen ridiculous AI generated images with too many fingers, creepy AI avatars in the uncanny valley, and AI generated videos with broken physics. You’ve read text that was painfully obviously generated with AI.
But, the technology is improving. AI images are already at the point where they can be indistinguishable from real photos, and AI videos are improving rapidly. AI voices are significantly better than they were, even a year ago, and that’s already significantly affecting the voice-over industry.
It’s impossible to really predict the long-term effects of AI. Although I have seen many trends fizzle out and not live up to their claims, AI feels different to me. Partly because we can use AI in practical ways right now … it’s not just something that could hypothetically be useful in the future.
People are justified in raising ethical and practical concerns with AI too. We need to think about how we keep a “human in the loop” for most uses of AI in order to reduce the potential harm. Intellectual property is a major concern along with information security are some other topics of concern. AI can enable scams and frauds, some of which are pretty scary. Those are all long-term effects that often get glossed over in AI discussions.
Where do you stand?
Where are you in the continuum from “AI is revolutionary” to “AI is garbage”? Are you somewhere in the middle like me? Are you leaning more to one end of the spectrum or the other? Let me know, [email protected].