AI + The New Human Frontier

CHAPTER 8Generative AI's Inflection Point

One key difference with more recent innovations such as generative AI is that they diffuse much faster than previous disruptive tech. This is templosion at play—the collapsing of time horizons from centuries to decades to years to months to weeks. AI's productivity curve may also be faster. Research by Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson, University of Pennsylvania's Daniel Rock, and Booth's Chad Syverson identifies a productivity J-curve in past eras of technological change—in other words, a time in which productivity lulled and was followed by a period of acceleration. The researchers note that start-up funding for AI increased from $500 million in 2010 to $4.2 billion by 2016. Then, in the first half of 2023 alone, AI-related start-ups raised $25 billion.¹ Because of this, it's not giving us a lot of time to respond. The rapid growth of AI can be concerning to many, including business leaders and economists, because gradual and incremental, rather than fast, adoption of AI across all sectors is preferable. It allows society at large time to catch up, to update its knowledge, to capture attitudes towards different scenarios, and to understand its implications.

Generative AI very quickly captured the public's imagination. Not many technologies have been unveiled to such fanfare. The AI chatbot ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, drew 1 million users after only a few days of its unveiling in November 2023, making it one of the fastest product launches ...