AI - The Most Impactful Event of our Lifetime?

Sitting on the train this morning, I was playing back a recent conversation with friends and colleagues on the impact of Artificial Intelligence. We were discussing the implications of AI and how it had changed our various industries, and our predictions on how it would shape our future. Then one of our party said…

“This is the most impactful event that we will ever see in our lifetime…”

I thought about this and felt impelled to respond. The subsequent conversation went along these lines:

In my four-decade career I have seen many amazing advances in technology, I believe this trend will continue in the future.

Technology that emerged in the 70s and 80s transformed businesses from manually writing in journals and physically looking things up to being able to retrieve information at the touch of a button.

Even in 1984 when I started working as a computer operator, we were still printing boxes of statements and transferring them to microfiche them to keep an accurate record of the transactions in the credit society. If a customer wanted to look at a transaction dated further back than the current statement, we had to dig out the relevant reel, find the customer and then print it off. It was revolutionary when we were able to retire those machines and have everything online. Almost every industry was affected in some way.

The changes seemed small at first but in hindsight they transformed the industry, boosting efficiencies and delivering productivity levels that couldn’t have been achieved before.

Throughout the 90s the internet became widely available to the public. During this time, I was a university student and the impact was enormous.

At the time academia focused on the negative possibilities to education:

“Plagiarism will be rife…how will we know if this is original work or just copied and rearranged for someone else’s text…?”

“The Internet will change the way we work”…and it has.

Who would think that they could do without the internet in their daily work and personal lives today? How has research changed with the introduction of digital archives? How this access changed how children today experience media? Though I do miss the library and the feel of “real books”!

Similarly for businesses the internet had a significant impact on their operations and they started using tools only previously heard about in Sci-Fi novels. One such technology was GPS.

We were working for a wholesale nursery (growing plants) who had a fleet of trucks, delivering plants throughout the state and nationwide. Loading and route planning was very much done by gut feel.

Using the GPS software, Map Info version 1, we produced a Logistics system which significantly reduced the time for loading and delivery of the plants and created savings of over 25%. Today this same technology is available as virtual maps and guidance is available in every car on the road.? In the 2020s this same technology is fundamental to driverless cars that we would have said would never happen…but they have.

In 1998, we transformed a media monitoring agency from a room full of people reading around 7000 publications to find mentions of their clients, to a system that scanned, OCRed and searched the documents automatically. This tripled the number of publications that they could process. This was further accelerated when these magazines and newspapers went online and now of course it’s been transformed again by Google.

Google became a household name in the early 00s. By 2004 people were googling questions over 200 million times a day. The search engine had such an impact on the English lexicon that the verb “to google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006.

Then on June 29th 2007, the Apple iPhone was released, and the power of the internet was at everyone’s fingertips even when away from the computer desktop. This was a truly revolutionary event and a step change on how we were able to work. I never imagined, when I started work, that the compute power that I have in my hands every day would dwarf what was needed to run a large financial institution at the time. How did we ever manage to work without the power of the internet…Google…banking applications etc. at our fingertips?

I don’t know what the next technological change will be, but I’m certain that there will be much more beyond AI, and it will be as life changing as the technology that has come before.? I don’t know what it will be called…or how it will be deployed, however it will come, and we need to be ready to accept it and take advantage of the technical evolutionary changes as they continue to roll on.

There are always barriers to technological advancements and changes, and AI is no different. We are seeing increased power usage to process the volume of data that is being accessed by organisations and individuals. This challenge is driving advances in finding new ways to produce clean power sources, both centrally and on site, leading to a significant uplift in the sustainability of our industry. The Data Centres and infrastructure that we all use today have always been hungry for the resources needed to run them, but the demand is forcing the global community to come up with new and unique ways to tackle this issue.

I feel so privileged to work in this industry. I can’t wait to see what pops up next and how it will affect our lives in the next 10…15…20…and if I’m lucky to see it…50 years!