We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. — Roy Amara
When we look at the giddy year since ChatGPT, are we looking at a short-term effect, it is just a year after all? Or are we looking at a pattern of events on the other side of the inflection point of a long-run trend?Â
Or, are we experiencing a compressed time where a decade of change happens in a year, a year in a month? And we’re still seeing, in other words, short-term effects play out?
We’re around ten years into the exponential transition.
It was, roughly, a decade ago when the giants of the oil age were surpassed by silicon stars, Apple and the like, as the largest firms in the world. So too a decade-or-so since deep-learning and data-meets-compute started to become useful. More than a decade since the smartphone became the ubiquitous computing device giving most of us an internet-connected super computer in our pocket. Beyond that, it’s 6-7 years since sola…