AI is Not New

Speaker 1: (00:00)
AI is disrupting our lives in an incredible way. And it’s not just business change, it’s societal change, but people forget that AI is actually very familiar. It’s really just the next chapter in what has been an unrelenting, continuous march of technological impact on our society. And it’s not just since the computer, it’s actually for millennia, since the plow was invented thousands of years ago.

Exponential Growth
And that’s important to remember because this exponential growth impact has a signature, the timeframe, the speed, and even the impact level may be changing, and I think it’s accelerating. But the process, the dynamics of the impact of these technological changes on our society and our lives has followed a pretty similar pattern through the years, whether it’s the Gutenberg press or the internet and everywhere in between and what’s coming after AI, you can see common traits.

History Rhymes
And while they’re not exactly the same, there’s lessons in what happened before. So look back and see how businesses, how societies and how people have rode the waves of technology change in the past. It includes things like incredible opportunity for early adopters and overreach and a bubble or a re retrenchment when people learn things weren’t actually as easy or as ideal as they thought. And then a turbulent time when things rebalance and people find the new path, despite some pain and loss, by the way, there’s always pain and loss in this natural evolution of the world that finds a new equilibrium and then onto the next. It’s all the more important for you to learn from the past about what happens because it is faster, it is more impactful, and the next one might even be more. So your best lesson isn’t to view AI as this incredible new thing that’s never happened before. You have much more resources when you look for things you can learn from the past to apply to this new wave.