What happens when AI fades into the background (like gigabit fibre)?
In 1997 nobody could explain why you would want a gigabit connection, because the honest pitch was that your email would arrive faster, and that wasn’t worth the money. Everything that eventually made the bandwidth worth having hadn’t been built yet. There was no bandwidth to build it for.
I think this is a good point. Even in 2014, when I was at Mozilla, there were specific 'GigLabs' in places like Chattanooga where gigabit fibre was becoming available. And no-one really knew what to do with it:
The GigLab represents the first public space of its kind. We expect people to come in and try to push boundaries, break things, and make terrible mistakes. This approach is contrary to standard IT practices that are designed to minimize such risks. GigLab has created an open network and equipment stack designed for public experimentation, and acts as a device lab of sorts targeted specifically at high-bandwidth hardware.
I've had gigabit fibre at home for a few years now, and it's the kind of thing that sinks into the background. In our case, allowing both my wife and I to work from home, my son to be gaming, and me to be downloading things all at the same time. This is all quite prosaic.
But it's also enabled realtime surgery to be taking place between hospital locations, for businesses to move their operations to the 'cloud' meaning it's easier to collaborate between sites, and for staff to work from home, and for much power powerful compute to be available via data centres. It's "strategic enabling infrastructure" which allows for changes which we now take for granted, but would be seen as transformatory even a decade ago.
Back in 2017, a report for Vodafone about 5G connections speeds outlined much of what life looks like now, and will continue to progress towards up to about 2030. If we layer AI on top of that, then we see that, for better or worse, we're accelerating towards a very different world than many of us grew up in.
Image: CC BY Lone Thomasky & Bits&Bäume