New is Nothing New

One afternoon several millennia ago, townsfolk looked in astonishment as a potter brought his wares to the market. At first it appeared he was effortlessly dragging the sizable load with superhuman ease. But as he came closer, they saw that he had attached two potter’s wheels to some wood, and those wheels turned and supported the load as he pulled.

The town talked about that brilliant idea frequently thereafter. With it, one could move so much more, without a donkey that needs food and gets sick. But for the rest of their lives, their sightings of wheels would be few and far between. It would take millennia for the wheel to become a common mode of transportation. It had actually taken millennia for the original innovation, the potter’s wheel, to be innovated into a mode of transportation.

And while they were correct in their original assessment that this innovation would have a great impact on their lives, it was impossible for them to imagine the exponential growth of impact that it has reached by now. Today, wheels make electricity, propel airplanes, and cut dental crown preps.

But for all the innumerable ways the wheel has made life easier, it has not brought the human race to a utopia. Once work could be done more quickly, more work was expected. Motor vehicle collisions kill millions every year. The wheel has been used to make weapons, and as weapons, since very early.

Every innovation threatens to rock the boat – to upset the equilibrium. But is the current equilibrium the best possible equilibrium? Imagine a world without wheels, or calculators. What would no longer be possible without the internet? Relationships suffer when loved ones are more engaged with their phones than those they share a room with. But the internet also connects people around the world.

Initial reactions to an innovation range from loathing to ecstatic, predictions from dismissive to ground-breaking. How successful a new idea will be is often not appreciated until it has had enough time to be integrated into the world. That may take decades, because there follow tens to thousands of innovations on the innovation, as well as new applications for the innovation. For those particularly successful innovations, the magnitude of their effect may in fact exceed all but the most fanciful predictions. Yet the decades it takes to reach that level allows most of humankind to accept it, and even use it.

While to many, AI is a novelty that exploded into the news in the past several months, its past is similar to that of the wheel and most other innovations. It started long before the general public noticed it, decades before any house (let alone pocket) had a computer. It had periods when its progress portended a world take-over, only to disappoint the enthusiasts at then-insurmountable hurdles.

From each burst of progress and subsequent lull came new bite-sized applications that people could digest. Voice recognition, driving directions, autocorrect, and digital animal faces during video calls, are all applications of AI that have been around for some time. In dentistry, AI is becoming involved in three-dimensional imaging and surgical planning.

It is a common mistake to think one’s generation is dealing with a challenge greater than that of any generation before. But there are reasons to believe that AI may indeed be in a league of its own. No prior innovation took reasoning out of the hands human beings. Until AI, no non-living object could think. Thinking makes up a tremendous portion of life, work, and innovation. AI thus may become embedded in all of that.

Though very far in the future, some say the ultimate application of AI will be when through machine learning, machines will build themselves, innovate themselves, and protect themselves from anything or anyone that tries to stop them. This unsettling possibility, of course, would be beyond the lifetime of anyone living today, and may never come to fruition.

Yet the question of whether an innovation is good or bad is likely moot. AI is here to stay. No amount of outcry or legislation can put the brakes on a successful innovation. If it can provide an economic advantage, it will not be ignored. The more capable and applicable (for good or bad) an innovation, the more certain its permanence.

AI may only be in its infancy, but the services that use it will never go back, just as people will never return to dragging their goods around. The only option now is to determine how it should and can be regulated, and how it can be used for good.

And to do each, we must learn the ins and outs of what AI even is. Hence, this article collection. There is much for us human beings to learn, even in a world with machine learning.