🔮 AI disillusionment; slavery; million-mile batteries; Apple chips, Lego computers and zero-G becs++ #274

I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

The near future

“An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in”, argues Tim Cross in The Economist. Most of the arguments and case studies will be familiar to regular readers of this letter or, perhaps, more easily summarised by the evergreen Gartner hypecycle. For a number of sub-domains of AI, we are very well entrenched in the trough of disillusionment. Cross points out that “Two-fifths of [large firms] with ‘significant investments’ in AI had yet to report any benefits at all. [They] seem to be cooling on the idea more generally.” My comment: Judging the success of AI as a technology by the effectiveness of large company investments is a woeful tally. Large firms have a shonky track record of even banal technology transformations. Older data from 2012, before the current AI wave, on such sallies mak…