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Approaching AI takeover and how to remain relevant
Avoiding FOMO and building insight for enduring growth.
Predicting the future based on past evidence
In March 2019, four years ago, I gave a talk at the AIA New York Center for Architecture, as a part of the FutureNOW: Re-imagining Practice Through Data Disruption symposium.
My topic was Forward Thinking and I was asked to share my projections about Artificial Intelligence and its implications for the design community.
I used a diagram from MIT Technology Review, the article entitled Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Exceed Human Performance.
The chart shows the time (year) when and AI application will be able to perform equivalent or better than a human counterpart.
If you look at the predicted time for an AI application to write a New York Times Best-Seller, the dot falls around +35 years from 2016, which happens to be 2051.
Looking at where ChatGPT is here today, that is hard to believe. Most of us would expect this task to be taken care of within the next 5 to 10 years.
Not a big surprise for such predictions to fail, as Nassim Taleb constantly keeps warning us about it:
“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher; every day confirms to its staff of analysts that butchers love turkeys “with increased statistical confidence.” The butcher will keep feeding the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving… [The] turkey will have a revision of belief — right when its confidence in the statement that the butcher loves turkeys is maximal and ‘it is very quiet’ and soothingly predictable in the life of the turkey.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Increase in speed of change
If you have been tracking artificial intelligence research for a while, you should have seen the first signs of rapid development approaching in around 2015–2017, and things pretty much bursting 1–2 years ago.
