Reasons to dream: the J and the AI
What would have happened if the current pandemic had hit us in 2000, when we lacked the current technologies and communication infrastructures? Those that have allowed us to maintain social distance and that many economic sectors continue to operate.
Miguel Rios already had to intuit something, when in his famous song “Year 2000” he told us that of: “Year two thousand. The year two thousand arrives. And the millennium will bring. A happy world. A place of terror. There simply won't be. Life on the planet. Life in our land. "
It turns out that the first two decades of this century have brought crises, terrorist attacks and, to top it off, a global pandemic, with the consequent supply and demand crisis. If we are left with only this part, we have more than enough reasons to see the future without optimism. But, if we evaluate with equanimity the successes and failures of the last 20 years, if we look to the future with realism, we will see that we have been realizing for years that there were things that were not working, but that we were not taking the necessary steps to improve the world; or at least we weren't giving them decisively.
It is up to us to determine whether 2020 will be remembered as a turning point, a learning moment in a turbulent century, or as the prelude to something worse. It is in our hands to bring a happy world or a place of terror, whether or not there is life on the planet. We certainly need to repair the cracks in our "digital" societies and achieve a sustainable balance with nature.
We know that digital transformation is not without its pernicious effects, including the rampant cyberattacks and large-scale disinformation campaigns. But we also know that there are no good or bad technologies. Technologies are neutral and we people are the ones who decide how we use them.
On more than one occasion I have said that innovation is not always visible, but its absence always is. And now I am optimistic that the economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson have been talking to us for a few years about the "J-curve of productivity", in which a new technology such as artificial intelligence initially depresses apparent productivity, but with the Time triggers much stronger growth in economic potential.
Reading the Spanish National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, we see that among its interesting strategic axes there is one that seems especially relevant to define our future: Integrating AI into value chains to transform the economic fabric. Sometimes it seems like organizations have been working a lot with no return, but once those returns start to flow, they come faster than seemed imaginable.
If 2020 has done anything, it has been to spur innovation around the world and right now there are several areas in which it seems that we are following the pattern defined by the J-curve, and I am not just referring to artificial intelligence, we can include to electric vehicles and 5G among many other innovations.
If we sharpen our wits, we assume that things are always better with friends and that the offshoring revolution is over; if we promote co-creation and co-innovation… we conclude that we have earned the right to think and act differently. It is time to reinvent ourselves, to take advantage of this crisis to put the XXI century on track; Innovation does not start with technology, but it is certainly a powerful tool for increasing human ingenuity. If we combine ESG with some of the existing technologies we will achieve much better results for the world.
Translation by Google Translate
Originally published at Disruptores e Innovadores