Punctuated Equilibrium
Where we are going (prediction)
In my end of 2022 post (Goodbye 2022, hello 2023) I made the observation that during the course of 2022 there had been 3.5 "breakthrough" AI stories defined as such by the degree to which they made it into mainstream media and became a part of the national, if not also the global, narrative about our future. And I predicted that the pace would increase in 2023:
"...an average of one major new practical application of AI per month as measured by that breakthrough reaching mainstream media awareness…"
As we approach the end of the first quarter and I look at everything that has happened already this year I can hear my friend James M. Spitze who commented on my article at the time:
You're off by a factor of ten.
In 2011 I wrote a book, Business Models For The Social Mobile Cloud, which is admittedly outdated at this point. But the last section of the book was about change and adaptation -- topics even more relevant today as we enter a period of even more urgent and rapid transformation than the combined forces of social media, mobile Internet, and cloud computing brought over the last twenty years. In this closing chapter I wrote about the concept, originally from biology, of "punctuated equilibrium" as opposed to "gradualism":
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"...the hypothesis that?evolutionary?development is marked by isolated episodes of rapid?speciation?between long periods of little or no change."
Geologists have also on occasion described transformations of the landscape using a parallel idea (Catastrophism) -- for example did the Channeled Scablands (barren soil-free ground) gradually develop in its current form or did a period of floods over a short time transform this landscape which has then been relatively stable ever since?
And in the development of technology do we also experience periods of massive change? Both world wars saw compressed periods of intense scientific research and a changing technological landscape. The beginning of the industrial revolution saw a rapid development of new manufacturing processes, the development of the world wide web, introduction of the iPhone then made the web mobile...
In each case the punctuation was a period of adjustment -- the process of change/development continued -- cars, airplanes, web browsers, phones all continued to improve. But there was a "punctuated" moment in which we could say - yesterday this was impossible, and today (and going forward) it is possible.
So a prediction - my friend Jim is right, we will see 10 times more change than I originally predicted back in December as we continue our journey through 2023. But at the same time that it continues to accelerate we will also be absorbing and adapting to this change. We will integrate these new capabilities into the way we work and we will adapt to the ways they are built into the other tools that we have accepted as normal over our lifetimes (computers, phones, cars...). And so we will move from today's breathless media awareness into a more regular pattern of awareness of the continuing (still increasingly rapid) development of these technologies.
Until the next flood.
Chairman at SCC Sequoia
2 年Of course I was right. I've been through it before. When Friden announced the EC 130), the world's first commercially successful Electronic Calculator in 1963, we (I was part of the design team) predicted sales of a few hundred a month - mostly as a Senior Exec status symbol because of its high cost (2x the mechanical equivalent), However, to our pleasure (mixed with a certain amount of horror) we started getting huge orders from the actuarial departments of the big insurance companies forcing us to ramp up production to almost 20,000 per month ... over 100x the prediction. We did it! ... story for another time ... by using D9 Caterpillar tractors and buying 1/7th of TI's total transistor production line. AI is similar. The circa 1842 words of Ada Augusta, The Countess of Lovelace, come to mind, "In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to?overrate?what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to?undervalue?the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable"