I am a frustrated futurist focussing in on the retail industry. Having spent 15 years in hardware (nuts and bolts) possibly one of the slowest moving, then 15 years in electronics and telco possibly one of the fastest, I consider myself qualified to comment.
I needed to do a bit of editing of my past posts to remove some random characters that were inserted when I raised my website from the dead after a hacker attack. This gave me the opportunity of reviewing some of my past predictions. Here are a few.
I think this is a good hit rate!
People who work with me today know that I am very bullish about AI. In the electronics and telco era of my career I witnessed many waves of rapid innovation diffusion and accelerated product life cycles.
I have never seen anything like the current adoption of AI. AI is going to change our lives and underpin every decision we make. It will be a utility like water or electricity, you won’t know it is there. The wave is about to crash over our heads. Already AI agents are exceeding human ability in some tasks.
If you want to get more of an idea about what is happening read one of the top academics in the area, Etham Mollick’s latest post about OpenAI latest release of AI model, GPT-4o.
Once you can interact with an AI model on a visual and auditory basis this opens the adoption curve even further.
Check out this link to OpenAI’s video about getting two AI agents to communicate together.
We are now entering a scary world where the delineation between what is human and what is AI is impossible to determine unless called out. We need to adopt some guardrails.
My new predictions are:
Governments will mandate that AI models will need include in their training on a core set of “morals frameworks.” These will be set at the Nation level and set and controlled by an independent body. These will be funded by a levy on all those who wish to develop an AI agent and release it into the wild.
Non fungible tokens, NFT’s, will come to the fore, this technology will ensure that the AI Agent has passed the moral framework training. NFT’s will also ensure that we know what content is human and what is AI.
We live in interesting times – onwards and upwards.