Forecasting technology is perilous, many would tell you, and they’d be right. Keep that in mind as “everyone” starts to opine about the future of AI and what it means for life, government, the economy, industries, products and processes, innovation, education or culture.
Some trends futurists predicted in 1995 for the internet have not come to pass, and some that seem to be taking decades to occur. As always, we have been wrong about lots of things.
Other general shifts are happening, but inconsistently and over a longer time span than some might have predicted. The internet was believed to revolutionize education, but so far the impact has been more evolutionary.
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The internet was believed to make it possible for people to work from anywhere in the world, and that has happened, to an extent. But not every job function can be virtualized, and not every job function has better outcomes for customers or users when virtualized.
As always, some believed the internet will lead to a more decentralized and egalitarian world. It is not clear how much that has happened, and in what areas of life it has happened. People undeniably have more opportunities to contribute to what we once called “media,” as in “social media.”
But it is questionable whether that degree of participation or enablement has really led to the world becoming more decentralized or egalitarian.
For example, forecasters predicted in the mid-1990s that the internet would lead to a more decentralized world, with less reliance on large institutions or firms. However, in reality, the internet arguably has led to a more centralized world, with a few large companies dominating the online landscape in almost any field.
Internet or not, that tends to be the pattern in every industry, globally, in any case, so we were likely naive to believe the laws of economics would change.
Many predicted that traditional media, entertainment and content industries would disappear, or be replaced by new challengers. Though pressures clearly exist, with product formats shifting from physical to virtual, existing industry leaders have managed to cope, if with difficulty.
Perhaps the better description is that the internet slowly is forcing a shift of media, content and entertainment business models from physical to virtual, but that the shift is taking decades to happen. Two and a half decades after the early internet became a mass market reality, we still are transitioning from physical to virtual in the value chain.
But humans seem always to have been poor forecasters. Consider the many examples of smart, informed observers making completely incorrect predictions.
* "There is practically no chance (that) communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television or radio service inside the United States."—T.A.M. Craven, Federal Communications Commission commissioner (1961)
* "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."—Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
* "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."—Sir William Preece, chief engineer, British Post Office, 1876
* "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication."—Western Union internal memo, 1876.
* "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."—Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946
* "Everyone's always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone. My answer is, 'Probably never.'"—David Pogue, The New York Times, 2006
* World Economic Forum, 2004: "Two years from now, spam will be solved."
* Foreword to the OS/2 Programmer's Guide, 1987: "I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
* COMDEX keynote speech, 2002: "Within five years, I predict it (Windows Tablet) will be the most popular form of PC sold in America."
* "By the time you read this story, the quirky cult company (Apple)…will end its wild ride as an independent enterprise."—Fortune, February 19, 1996
* "Apple [is] a chaotic mess without a strategic vision and certainly no future."—TIME, February 5, 1996
* "Whether they stand alone or are acquired, Apple as we know it is cooked. It's so classic. It's so sad."—A Forrester Research analyst, January 25, 1996 (quoted in The New York Times)
* "The NeXT purchase is too little too late. Apple is already dead."—Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft's chief technology officer, June 1997)
* "Apple's erratic performance has given it the reputation on Wall Street of a stock a long-term investor would probably avoid."—Fortune, February 19, 1996
* "For all of his success, all Steve Jobs had really accomplished was a temporary pause in Apple's long-term decline."—Infinite Loop, 1996, by Michael S. Malone
* "I'd shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders."—Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, Inc., 1997
So far, I’ve not seen one single prediction about entirely new products or industries AI will create. Everything is “AI-assisted X,” as once upon a time everything was “Internet X” or X.com.
That will not be helpful, even if a fairly reasonable description of how early AI (AI-assisted existing processes and products) will be applied.
What many of us are looking for are the unexpected and brand-new use cases, products, applications and revenue sources AI will create.
Right now, our crystal balls are not useful.
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