Azeem Azhar, Founder of Exponential View
The scale, extent and impact of the AI revolution is the largest since the Industrial Revolution, dwarfing one of the most dramatic periods of change for humankind. AI will provide superpowers to humans able to access them. And they’re already in use in everyday life, with a world of possibilities waiting to be discovered.
Trivially, they may automate boring, repetitive tasks. More excitingly, they may scale the capabilities of a credit officer, surgeon or analyst, allowing them to achieve more, at a higher quality, in less time.
History has told us that innovations like this tend to work out for the better: human welfare improves, as measured by lifespans, mortality rates, education levels and political participation.
But such innovations do not emerge in society without a few plates being broken, to put it mildly. The industrial revolution saw terrible working conditions which were met by stronger labour protections, in some countries they brought revolutions, in other social dislocation.
The sequence of small innovations that occurred in England between the late seventeenth and mid eighteenth century set in train a set of events that could scarcely have been predicted. They are still analysed by historians today.
Humanity burst through the Malthusian trap that had kept populations small and people poor. Britain itself, riding the rocket of cheaper energy, better mechanisation and a higher birth rate, became the dominant nation in the globe. These technologies that made physical toil so much easier spread around the world, and for many nations drove a wealth and population boom.
Today, the technologies of artificial intelligence, are posed to do for cognitive work—thinking—what the industrial revolution technologies did for back-breaking labour. What does this mean in practice?
Today’s AI systems provide superpowers to both our IT systems and humans using them alike. For our technology systems, it makes them more adaptable and applicable in new areas. For decades, computers have relied on typed keyboard commands. Today’s AI-laced systems can interact with imagery from cameras or the spoken word.
Even if, as seems reasonable, the dispersion of artificial intelligence into our society takes us to some sunnier uplands, it will bring with it tremendous change. And that change, if not managed well, could result in huge social friction.
So too are the risks of poor thinking and botched execution. And the clock is ticking. Over the past thirty years, we have created an environment perfect to roll out artificial intelligence. Companies have built themselves around well-documented processes and have invested heavily in information technology to digitise those processes. It’s a perfect environment for an AI system, which today depends on the ready supply of digital data and the need to be plugged into some kind of IT infrastructure.
At the same time, we’ve made great progress since the small breakthroughs in various types of deep learning at the turn of the decade. Toolkits are widely available, even from non-specialists, and we continue to make measured progress in the sophistication and simplicity of AI technologies.
The Industrial Revolution in England may have taken more than 100 years. The AI revolution will be faster. Over the coming years, no firm will survive on AI alone. But no firm will survive without using the technology. And society will question its norms. New rules will be needed and new institutions will arise, old ones will adapt, some will die. It will be a complex transition. And the benefits are close at hand to those who are prepared. But the risks, many of which we outline in this document, are as proximate.
Fortune favours the prepared mind. We encourage you to use this report as a way to ponder the challenges and opportunities that AI will provide, and to ask yourself honestly how well-equipped you and your company are for these changes.
Azeem Azhar Founder, Exponential View
Azeem Azhar is an entrepreneur, investor and adviser with a two-decade career in technology.
He runs the highly-cited newsletter, Exponential View, which covers the societal implications of technology and is a totemic source for the investors, entrepreneurs and policy-makers. Azeem also advises breakthrough entrepreneurial firms, including Kindred Capital, Onfido, Ocean Protocol & ReInfer; as well as the Harvard Business Review.
Previously, he’s been an award-winning entrepreneur founding the VC-backed, PeerIndex, which was acquired in 2014. He’s also invested in more than 30 startups, with exits to Microsoft & Amazon, amongst others. The early part of Azeem’s career took him to journalism, where he covered technology at The Guardian and The Economist. Azeem has also had strategy and innovation roles at the BBC and Thomson Reuters, and was on a non-executive board at Ofcom, the UK’s converged communications regulator.