We are in a Knowledge Revolution

The first lines of the Wikipedia article on the Industrial Revolution reads as follows:

"The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing, and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power and water power, the development of machine tools, and the rise of the mechanized factory system. Output greatly increased…”

When one thinks about hand production methods, it evokes a craftsman from the 1700s working in a village, specializing in a certain skill set, and providing goods to folks within the surrounding communities but only at the rate at which they can cultivate the raw materials and then produce the goods themselves. This limited not only the production rate for given goods but also the number of people that could obtain something that served as a precursor for something more complicated to be built using that crafted good.

As mass production took off, people went from cooking stews in a pot by the fireplace to have the ability to acquire a durable stove at a reasonable price which led to kitchens improving what was possible to prepare and cook, which led to scaling the production of food as well as the number of people one could cook food for at any given time which allowed for more significant innovation in cooking and led to the diverse food creation culture we have worldwide today.

As a result of mass production, inventions were created on top of goods made available for the first time in greater quantities, while the means to transport and sell those goods grew exponentially during the same time period. The revolution happened at every level and paved the way for modern society.

ChatGPT isn't the first chatbot to be built, nor the first public display of an AI. What it did though, is make a sophisticated chatbot accessible to anyone globally, which was built on a large language model and presented to the public in a way everyone could access and leverage it. No terminal windows, experience with programming, or advanced degrees are required to type a question in a prompt and get an intelligent answer in return.

It's the first durable kitchen stove made accessible to people used to cooking in a pot on a fireplace that anyone can afford to purchase and use. It is now leading to hundreds of innovative ways to leverage such a tool since it was made available to the general public. Students will study AI, being inspired by what they can generate. At the same time, technologists around the world will be tasked with finding new ways to leverage this technology in the midst of what they've already been working to develop. A million people signed up for ChatGPT within a week and a month after launching; there are now 276 million articles on Google related to ChatGPT. Yes, AI has been in the public sphere in various ways before ChatGPT came along and wasn't even the first AI-powered utility that OpenAI, the non-profit behind ChatGPT, had released (let's show some love for DALL-E too, eh?).

Blackberries existed before iPhones, though, as did many smartphones before the iPhone. There's no denying the impact iPhones had in increasing adoption and innovation in the smartphone space, pushing the technology more into the mainstream and out of the office space to bring about several innovations built around the smartphone in the years to follow along with Android closely behind it.

I think, more than just a more useful AI-based tool out there being leveraged by people in interesting ways, the use of ChatGPT will kick off a million inspired technologies in the years to come that create new ways to make knowledge accessible and this will be seen as a moment where the Knowledge Revolution really started to take off. These tools will bring about the public being able to access a "mentor and student" relationship with technology in a Socratic style that will educate and inform people in entirely new ways. When answers to difficult questions become more accessible, like durable stoves for cooking food became more accessible in the industrial revolution, what's possible now that knowledge is more accessible?

How does farming food improve and scale now that farmers can ask questions about how to improve their yields with all the data necessary to come up with the answer being analyzed in entirely new ways with larger data sets made accessible via knowledge-sharing networks? And if farming improves, with the yield going up and cost going down, how does that change the world having access to lower-cost foods at higher qualities because of the innovations around knowledge generation at the crop level through to the consumer? It's not that tools like ChatGPT alone will be the change agent, but the improvements in every industry built on top of the mass consumption of knowledge-based tools will have no less an impact or perhaps even more of one than mass production did in the 17-1800's.

Because goods could be built at scale and made accessible to larger groups of people, the innovations built on top of those goods and the impacts across every industry catapulted mankind into revolutions from medical science to consumer packaged goods.

How will the same be true for the knowledge revolution taking place? We are just at the start of a decades-long shift from analog to digital and are seeing more and more technologies being brought out of computer science laboratories and the back offices of high-tech companies, and are now seeing state of the art in AI brought out into Q&A-style terminals accessible via a simple login and chatbot-style interface even though tools like Alexa and Siri have made NLP accessible for years before the launch of ChatGPT. It's all building blocks, though, that lead to a mainstream breakthrough that unlocks a million more innovations stemming from one particular invention. Thomas Edison may not have created the very first light bulb or the Wright brothers building the very first plane, but their breakthroughs unlocked those technologies that led to millions of people being able to consume something that was too cumbersome and expensive to acquire and use prior to their contributions.

I think ChatGPT did something similar last month, unlocking a key set of breakthroughs that are now generating millions of people innovating on top of the technology, with many more innovations to come (and improvements later this year with the release of GPT4 and no doubt a number of other competitors in this space).

This knowledge revolution is just kicking up steam and will retire a number of existing data-driven technologies used imperfectly to impart insight, with the word "data" itself being retired by yours truly on this newsletter (see my prior article for more context) and I'm very excited to see what's to come as this revolution continues to grow globally.