A new era of computing - faster horses
In the advent of automobiles, a well-known saying from Henry Ford was, that if he listened to his customers, he would have built faster horses.
There is a parallel in probably every major technical invention, in that its use is first thought to be an extension, a forward-writing of existing technology. To me, it is close to evidence that our brain is working quite similar to LLMs actually. We also mostly imagine something we’ve already seen with maybe little variance - depending on our temperature. 😊
And yet, new technologies and especially new use cases emerge and cannot be foreseen. In hindsight, everything can be explained with rational, but it is impossible to predict in advance. And if we factor in the effect that we overestimate the short-term impact of inventions and underestimate the long-term impact of it, then this gets even harder,
To me, this means the follow is probably the future of computing and AI, I will still experience in the decades to come:
- We will realize that all the discussions about AGI resulted in nothing but utopian (or dystopian) dreams that didn’t materialize
- We succeeded in gaining huge productivity gains with agentic software, targetting individual domains with specific, classical workflows
- We struggled in building up the technical infrastructure (data centers and energy supply), but found ways to overcome resource shortages
- We ceeated the next phase of tge internet and social media, where everybody knows, it all fake, but still tempting to follow
- We will be surprised long-term about unpredictable effects of it all
Whst do you think, could be those effects?
Let’s continue that thread in a future post…