Early Artifical Intelligence (AI) has been driven by Large Language Model (LLM) processing where AI consumes large quantities of text (copyrights be damned!) and uses that data to sculpt responses to queries, striving for the goal of grammatically correct, mostly sensical and mostly right. Having consumed all the easily available text on the Internet, AI has moved onto a technique known as Reinforcement Learning (RL) which might best be described as throw it against the wall and see what sticks.
AI also already begun to touch society as well. An early complaint was students using ChatGPT to do homework, quickly followed by teachers using ChatGPT to grade homework. You can just squint and see a time where the middlemen are removed from this equation.
The big AI arms race involves the traditional technology companies (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google) trying frantically to monetize AI by weaving it into their existing products. History tells us they will fail miserably, and the big winner will be someone as yet undetermined using AI in an as yet undetermined way. And whatever that proves to be, it will involve the easiest path to revenue. Money changes everything.
Here are four video f’rinstances:
- The inventor of the Internet describing his vision. How close was he?
- The introduction of the iPhone by Apple. In today’s world, the use case looks quaint.
- A talk showing how companies defending their revenue can make all the right decisions and still fail.
- A talk that shows how paralysis is also a failing strategy.
These are cautionary tales for AI.
The Internet
Here’s a very short interview with Sir Tims Berner-Lee, the architect of the internet, describing the use case he had in mind. The key takeaway here is his emphasis on collaboration. The internet is, as he described, predominately used for information retrieval but often of dubious quality, uni-directional, and weaponized.
The iPhone
This is an excerpt of Steven Jobs introducing the iPhone to a very enthusiastic, even slightly rabid, crowd in 2007. Renown as both a visionary and a master marketeer, it feels like he missed the iPhone’s eventual landing spot. In 2025 a better description might be a texting device with easy access to gaming and social media; can also make phone calls.
Here’s how Steven Jobs saw the iPhone back then:
But we did everything right!
Why am I so confident that current companies will make choices that, in retrospect, will have been clearly misguided? Because history tells us! Here is Clayton Christenson, the American business consultant and academic, working through an example of what is known as the innovator’s dilemma. This also answers the question – how did we lose all those manufacturing jobs that Trump is trying to “tariff” back to the US? Spoiler alert: it was capitalism.
Education
The flip side of the innovator’s dilemma is the inertia of the status quo.
It is truth universally acknowledged that the US has botched education. We are sixth in the world in per student spending for education, but twenty-second in the world in educated population.
One might suggest this calls for a reinvention of our approach. Instead, Trump is rolling our education strategy back to the Reagan era (prior to the Department of Education). Here is Sir Kenneth Robinson, a British education advisor, proposing an alternative approach to education, encouraging rather than punishing creativity. Did his proposal take off? This video is nearly twenty years old.
