What is next big technology wave going to be? As usual, it's staring us right in the face.
Computers have been around since at least the 1940s and a part of American public consciousness since at least the 1950s. But they never really took off as a major phenomenon until the 1980s. That was the decade of the personal computer, when the technology finally reached the point where it matured enough to quite suddenly change life in this country. The iconic event of that decade -- the moment where the fundamental change at work really snapped clearly into place -- was the arrival of the Apple. Then the 1990s was the decade of the Internet (which had been around for a while but which didn't take off until the invention of its most successful application, the "World Wide Web" as people quaintly referred to it at the time). Perhaps our current decade is the decade of social networking, with Napster's explosion onto the scene in 2000-2001 being the revolutionary development that rocked the status quo and heralded the really new possibilities that the Web had opened up.
Decade Defining Trend Iconic event
1980s Computer Apple personal computer
1990s The Internet (Web) Netscape
2000s Social networking Napster
So what's next? Well, I predict that it will be another thing that has been lying around the public consciousness, and which has been around for decades without ever really playing any kind of transformative role. And that thing is artificial intelligence. Unlike pre-1980s computers, perhaps, AI has been the subject of much hype and science-fiction speculation for many years (see cover of a book I own, below). So much so that it is easy to think that it will never really live up to its promise.
But artificial intelligence is already creeping up on us. It is already clear that the intelligence level of the machines that surround us is rising rapidly. Most of our gadgets and appliances have the intelligence level of an insect at most; some may be more like the level of a trained dog. But many of the computer programs we use are already starting to feel like dumb humans. Computers have always been idiot savants, able to remember a million phone numbers but not recognize a phone, but their expertise is inexorably broadening. And we are beginning to trust computers with an increasing array of tasks. Just to pluck a few examples from the ether:
- In London, a girl was pulled unconscious from the bottom of a crowded swimming pool and saved from drowning after lifeguards were alerted by a computer monitoring the pool for swimmers in distress.
- Robot therapists are reportedly on the brink of revolutionizing physical therapy.
- Concern is growing among online poker players that card-playing “bots” are being used to rake in winnings.
And it is already commonplace within tech communities to speak about “intelligence” as a quality that is possessed in varying degrees by machines and software, not just people and animals. (“E-mail clients should have the intelligence to parse contact data found in an e-mail,” declares a technology columnist in a typical usage).
All that awaits is a crystalizing moment akin to the Apple IIe, Netscape, or Napster that really busts open a new awareness of what our technology has made possible, setting off a pent-up cascade of innovation. When will that come? I have no idea - it may not fit within any neat decade of its own, but I suspect it will be in the next 5-10 years.
People have been predicting the explosion of AI for decades now and it just hasn't happened. But Moore's Law churns on, and one of these days I think we're going to hit a critical mass of computing power and possibly a conceptual breakthrough or two (though I suspect one breakthrough that will prove to be crucial has already happened: evolutionary algorithms) and suddenly we'll be in a whole new world, again.
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