Here’s where I see all of this going — my own predictions for what historians may recall when they look back on these early days from a handful of years out.
First, the present tense, briefly. The New York Times ran a piece today headlined “The Chatbots Are Here, and the Internet Industry Is in a Tizzy.” A month ago Microsoft put a chatbot inside Bing. The day before that, Google announced Bard and search features that “distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.” Hold on to that word, distill.
People produced content for the Internet en masse because advertisers paid big bucks to influence the traffic visiting that rich content. But then, one day, AI chatbots appeared, consumed all of that content in minutes, and began making it available in a distilled and far more convenient format. Internet traffic started to slip, ad revenue dropped, content creators left the market as their incomes dried up, and wholesale changes to the web came swiftly with each leap in chatbot capability. It became clear that the day chatbots were introduced was also the pinnacle — the high-water mark — of all publicly available human-produced content.
Then the same thing began to happen to entertainment. On-demand TV, film, radio and music could be generated in minutes without actors, writers, producers or even set locations. You could just ask your TV to create programming you’d enjoy, and it would be spun up instantly from AI algorithms and hardware. It was estimated that over a million new episodes of Game of Thrones were created every day, each watched once by the person who requested it, then deleted to make room for the next one on that user’s TV.
Industry after industry evolved rapidly until, too late, governments stepped in to ensure AI outputs were level-set to a neutral bias, and a form of universal income was rolled out to relieve the job losses in the hardest-hit industries. The major AI providers were broken up, over and over, into smaller parts to separate their AI from their deep troves of consumer data and to encourage competition. It was a tumultuous half dozen years, but everything from human utility to creativity began to thrive as advanced economies settled into a post-AI-assisted paradigm.
Understanding what’s to come — how does one position oneself to cruise through the tumultuous parts?
