Me, Sam Altman, a Deer and an Ostrich Walk into a Bar...
The distant past 2016 / Sand Hill Group ---
In 2016 the lovely, smart, storied folks at Sandhill Group published a slightly geeky paper about the future of tech that I wrote entitled Homo Cumulatus.
That translates to aggregated and/or augmented man. My argument was that the future of tech was not some of the then-current buzzy stuff like The Intent of Things but a broader, smarter, better approach anchored in aggregating data, information,knowledge, and intelligence.
In 2017, I wrote the tech strategy for an F20 company, Entitled: The Demand for Intelligent. The strategy basically said there would be a bifurcation between intelligent and non-intelligent products, services, experience, company processes, supply chain, education, healthcare, warfighting, etc.
These turned out be true but understated. Understated in how quickly, broadly, and easily intelligence would be adopted/utilized.
DIsagreeing and Agreeing with Sam
As our fearless FedEx president, Jim Barksdale, said about the Internet when he took over Netscape, 'This will change everything.'
Sam Altman wrote the attached document for the near future of Intelligence. I agree 98%. The two percent I do not agree with is just two things, but kind of important:
There is a potential to mismanage the wealth creation of this (not the benefits) that will fester into a powder keg in a decade.
A slowdown/elimination in hiring will mask job losses. Regardless, real job loss differentials may also grow into a powder keg by 2027 ... just in time to help create a truly incendiary/seismic US election. (note that incendiary and seismic stuff are normally never good things).
Sam thinks these can be managed by government...which maybe they can.
I do not have confidence in the structure, agility, leadership, or contextual understanding of the government's ability to figure this out and manage it, especially given the speed at which this tsunami of change is approaching.
Our current corporate structures and incentives will accelerate/inflate the job loss problem.
Our current national talent supply strategy and mechanisms for managing that is not a thing. It does not exist. Not just in the US but everywhere.
Maybe super tech-savvy Estonia gets it right.
A final note of optimism:
I have reasoned somewhat logical arguments that four things come together before next summer to help us start to leverage/manage this amazing change wave better:
1. With the help of a brutal winter and a better weapons balance the war in Ukraine/Russia ends with an intact and sovereign Ukraine.
2. The massive grief, damage, cost, inhumanity, and burden of the Arab - Israeli conflicts create leadership changes on both sides that lead to a positive off-ramp to peace.
3. US politics stabilizes, and we begin a period of productive coalescing and working in the overlaps of our Venn diagrams. (limited fringes get worse but shrink)
4. The speed, impact, and potential of this wave of AI-supercharged change in Science, Technology, and Infrastructure (in its broadest sense) become much clearer, and we start to react in a more organized, smart, coherent way versus deer in the headlights or the ostrich thing.
Tying back to Sam's cool brief article, the potential impacts and secondary waves from AI in all its forms not just Deep Learning will exceed our current imagination, on that, we agree:
