Mike Bechtel gave a talk last week in Austin to State information technology professionals called “The Future of AI”. His talk was an enlightening contextualization of Generative AI (GenAI). He said that AI is what we call computing when we don’t understand how it works. When Big Blue beat Kasparov, AI went from something magical and futuristic to something understandable and attainable. The public psyche reframed that win as just a computational inevitability. As Mr. Bechtel put it, “we moved the goalposts”. Going back to the earliest Babbage machine, this is a pattern over time.
With GenAI, as we move through the Hype Cycle, people will recontextualize GenAI as once again understandable, attainable, and inevitable. It is in this trough of the hype cycle that we will be able to see was to harness GenAI as yet another technological tool.
He also broke computing down into three lanes, Interaction (UI), Information (data), and Computation (Moore’s Law). As advances happen on these three parallel tracks, we see the impact on society.