The Next Big Wave

AI Is the Next Big Technological Wave

By Evan Reas '07 (Founder at AshramX, Tampa, FL)

Bill Gates is credited with saying that most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.

Many revolutionary technologies rhyme with this, whereby people overestimate how much it will impact the world in the short term but vastly underestimate the impact it will have in the long term. I believe artificial intelligence will be one of the starkest examples of this phenomenon in human history.

As somebody who is both a technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist, it is a critical part of my job to think about technology trends and how the future will be different than it is today.

The largest technology innovations in our lifetimes have been the personal computer, the Internet, and mobile phones. Those technologies impacted the daily lives of nearly every person in western civilization in a profound way. I believe AI will be the next technology that impacts nearly every person on a daily basis.

Some of the most extreme ways that AI will change how the world works will be similar to what we see in sci-fi movies. Cars will almost certainly drive themselves, and robots will almost certainly do factory work. Those things will be massive changes. However, the way that AI will impact more people more often is in things that are less obvious.

To really understand how prolific AI will be, we need to understand what exactly it is.

In its simplest form, AI analyzes tons of data (sometimes billions and billions of data points) to come up with a conclusion. In the example of ChatGPT by OpenAI, it analyzes almost all written text in human history to come up with the most likely answer to a question, written in a way that people would write it.

Even simpler, if I type a sentence with the final word missing, AI would use all this data and algorithms to predict what the most likely word should be. It's like the brainpower of all humans put together times a million, because it can do calculations that humans can't.

This will unlock solutions to some of the world's biggest problems in ways that will be hard to fathom today.

In the short term, we will likely see the way we interface with computers changing from term-based searches to more conversational things like chatbots. We will likely see more computer-generated text, voice, images, and videos. Very soon, the amount of content created by AI will surpass that of content created by humans.

We will also likely see the speed of discovery rapidly increase. This could unlock a new period of innovation like we haven't seen since the development of the printing press or the Internet. In the next few years, we will start to see discoveries in wonderful things like medicine, climate technology, and building materials.

We will also see rapid advancements in horrible things like AI weapons, biochemical warfare, and scams that will deplete people's life savings in seconds.

It will be a new world, and just as it was critical for people to understand how to utilize the Internet to be successful over the last 20 years, it will be critical for people to understand how to utilize AI for the coming 20.

Invest in your ability to understand and use AI and invest in AI itself. You won't want to be left behind in this wave. It could be the biggest one yet.