My favorite figures of speech are analogies and metaphors because they add spice and increase understanding. Saying someone is sharp as a tack, strong as an ox, or light as a feather paints an instant picture. Problems can be described as roadblocks, speedbumps or chipped away. Life events may be rollercoasters, but what’s past is in the rear-view mirror with the future in the windshield.  

Life is like a box chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.“

For the past few months, I’ve tried to compare the whirlwind of innovations that have sprouted from the widespread availability of artificial intelligence (AI) to another technological leap. The wheel was fine and dandy but was more of an evolution than leap.  

Farming along with the use of water and wind to grind grain, pump water, weave textiles, and power machinery were pivotal, enabling communities to focus on other activities besides hunting, gathering, and relying solely on man-, horse-, and oxen-power.

The only leap, which is remotely akin to AI, is electricity. Turning a spark into current radically changed every aspect of people’s lives, providing the bedrock to electrify communities, homes, buildings, and factories. Inventors were given the keys to innovate on the micro level—light bulbs, toasters, ovens, stoves, curling irons, coffee percolators, electric fans, and Christmas lights—to the macro—streetlights and streetcars, telegraphs and telephones, two-phase generators and underground power cables.  

Roughly two hundred years later, AI, machines’ ability to imitate intelligent human behavior, isn’t science fiction, but reality. Unlike the development and proliferation of electricity, AI required the intellectual horsepower of incalculable data scientists and developers, mountains of machine learning algorithms, and exceptional ingenuity.

The circle of cumulative causation of the “wheel of economic development” is renewed with the genesis of new technics and their innovations.”
Richard L. Brinkman, Cultural Economics

More astonishing, in less than 30 years, AI went from IBM’s state-of-the-art supercomputer Deep Blue beating the chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1996 to being persistently available as generative chatbots and assistants, and woven into solutions across every specialty and industry.

Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909 perceived electricity as “Carrier of light and power, devourer of time and space, bearer of human speech over land and sea, greatest servant of man, itself unknown.”

It’ll be interesting to see how AI evolves whether it continues to be an esteemed servant for innovation and progress or tenacious menace, a new play in threat actors’ and propogandists’ repertoires.