The AI Age Begins

The beginning of a step change in human capabilities as well as a new season of events and media coming out of ground zero San Francisco

I think we have witnessed what will be widely understood as a world historical event with the arrival of Generative AI in 2023. The breakthrough of GenAI allows the opening up of artificial intelligence to everyone and so marks the true beginning of The AI Age. Humans are now going to move through a step change in our collective capabilities as we start to apply machine intelligence to all that we do. 

The arrival of this super-tool, this new general purpose technology, will drive a lot of changes through the 2020s, fundamentally rework how our economy and society operates over the next 25 years, and ultimately will make for civilizational scale change. This development we just witnessed is a very, very big deal. Few of us are thinking big enough about what lies ahead. Few of us are moving fast enough to deal with the many implications.

The timing and immediate impact of GenAI took me by surprise despite having worked within the tech and innovation worlds in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area for close to 30 years. I was not alone in being hit broadsides by the release of ChatGPT and needing to quickly reorient to the new reality. Many of the tech experts in the field of AI who I had gotten to know over the years were also surprised by how sophisticated and effective the models had become and how quickly they keep improving. Everyone in the tech world last year wanted to connect and compare notes about what the hell was happening. So that’s what I did. 

I was in a position with my company Reinvent Futures to host a series of events called The Great Progression series, which also became the name of this Substack series of essays and related media. My business partner Joe Boggio and I convened representatives of a wide range of networks in the region to try to answer some of the most pressing questions surrounding GenAI — what are the real implications, the positive possibilities and the actual risks? We brought together many seasoned veterans, the honored old guard of OGs, as well as the up-and-coming GenAI builders, plus well-known thought leaders, entrepreneurs, academics, investors and out-of-the-box thinkers. The events of 250 or so people held at the iconic Ferry Building attracted many top journalists too. 

I came out of those conversations of the last year with the understanding that the arrival of AI for everyone is a much bigger deal than the arrival of the internet for everyone in the early 1990s, which is what brought me out to San Francisco in the first place to work with the founders of WIRED magazine. I have spent the last 25 years in my writing and speaking explaining how the digital revolution and internet would play out — and largely did. 

I now see that all that slow work of incrementally boosting the power of computers, building high-bandwidth wireless networks, digitizing all data and storing it all in the cloud was building out the infrastructure for this next big chapter, the arrival of Artificial Intelligence. The real story is just starting.

This year of 2024 is going to be the year that Generative AI starts to really impact a wide range of industries and fields. This is the year where the realization will increasingly sink in that humans are entering a new age of possibilities, many of them positive, and some negative. Many people in the media and government and the public are focused on what could go wrong and why we should slow down. Fewer people seem to be looking at the many positive applications and why we should actually accelerate development.

So this year we are launching a new season of events called The AI Age Begins that will maintain a more techno-optimistic take on the arrival of GenAI and look at the many positive ways that AI could transform a wide range of industries and fields. The general template for each event of the series will be: How could AI supercharge progress in a field like energy & climate tech, healthcare & bioengineering, media & entertainment, or learning & education.

We will be using a similar Meeting of the Minds format for the events that we did in 2023 and they will be held once again at the iconic Ferry Building at ground zero San Francisco. (Watch this short video that sums up last season.) And like last year, I will write an essay on what we all learned for every event at our same free Substack publication The Great Progression. And we will produce videos of the short talks of many of the top speakers that you will be able to again watch on our YouTube Channel.

But before we start the new season, let me give some more context about why I think we have entered a truly extraordinary moment in history, and why I am not only excited but optimistic about what lies ahead as The AI Age Begins.

AI as a Step Change in Human Capabilities to Augment All We Do

The world faces some dire challenges starting with the mother of all challenges — climate change. You can add a bunch of others on the heap like economic inequality, a breakdown in education, add your issue. I get why many people feel overwhelmed by problems but I think these people often are trapped in pessimism because they are operating within outmoded frameworks of the past. The old ways of doing things aren’t working and so new challenges seem insurmountable. 

Most people have no idea how to envision a future where problems can get solved very differently — particularly using new tools. I’ve been in the business for decades of helping people understand how new technologies and new models built off those technologies can bring very different, better outcomes. AI is going to take this to a new level that few can imagine today. 

Artificial Intelligence can be seen as the latest of about 25 game-changing general purpose technologies that humans have successively used to augment their powers — from fire to the printing press to electricity. That’s a big enough deal. But AI is an even bigger deal because humans are now crossing the threshold into an entirely new realm of augmentation. 

I’ve been using an analogy in my talks about AI this year that seems to resonate with audiences. For the vast amount of time that humans have roamed around the planet we were limited in our physical powers by what our own muscles could do or those of animals we could harness to our needs. Then in The Enlightenment humans invented machines fueled by carbon energy that could dramatically augment our physical powers with the power of 200 horses and far more over time. That breakthrough of physical machines drove what became the industrial revolution that largely created the comparatively prosperous world of progress that we inhabit today. 

Now comes Artificial Intelligence. For all of human history any task in the world that required intelligence required a human brain to be applied to that task. As of 2023 that is no longer the case. We can now begin to apply machine intelligence to everything. And I mean everything, over time. The first categories of intelligence tasks will be in knowledge work that is all an ephemeral exercise anyhow. But increasingly over the coming decade that intelligence will inhabit more dexterous robots and physical machines like cars that will operate independently in the world too. 

We are crossing a threshold into fundamentally new territory. This is what I mean by a step-change in human capabilities. This is what I mean by we witnessed a world-historic event. A thousand years from now humans will look back on the 2020s as the decade that The AI Age began. 

Making the Case for the Many Positive Possibilities of this Super-tool

Many people when they initially understand that we are crossing this threshold— they freak out. They immediately snap into fears about the disruption and what could possibly go wrong. I guess that is based on a somewhat healthy human survival instinct to fear the unknown and cling to the tried-and-true. And so that’s where much of the media immediately went and a big chunk of the public followed. This is unfortunate because many are missing the other part of the story here: the many positive possibilities. 

I think AI is the super-tool that humans need at this juncture in history. To start with, we need it to solve climate change. Anyone who really understands the climate challenge knows that we have a short window of time to pull off a daunting transition to clean energies and sustainable everything. We can pull it off, we mostly know how to do it, but we need all the help we can get. How could this next generation of AI supercharge this effort? 

What could we do with AI to fundamentally rework the economy in ways that work better for everyone? Within the next couple years pretty much all knowledge workers will have a highly competent virtual assistant. Even now ChatGPT4 or the equivalent GenAI assistants are incredibly useful and this is still the very early days. (If you have not tried talking with one then go to ChatGPT4 and do so ASAP.) How will this boost overall productivity rates, and then probably the economic growth rates of developed economies? How could that new-found prosperity impact the incomes of workers, or tax revenues, which might bring down government deficits? 

How could AI be used to fundamentally rework education? Those virtual assistants could just as easily be designed to give every student in K-12 education a personal tutor. This may well be the game-changing technology that finally will reinvent education for the 21st century. And then could AI applied to higher education finally stop the insane cost escalation that is putting college beyond the reach of all but the wealthy?

These are the kinds of questions that we will explore in the 2024 season of our event series The AI Age Begins. The overarching theme of the series will be to systematically ask: How could AI supercharge progress in field X? Each event will gather experts in AI as well as from a particular field like clean energy or education. We’ll get some answers to those questions posed above.

A Look Ahead to The Roaring 20s Economic Boom

Get ready for what I think will turn out to be a redo of The Roaring 20s. The original period in the 1920s that coined the term did not really start to roar until several years into the decade. They, too, were just coming off a global pandemic, and were scaling up some new general purpose technologies like electricity and radio and cars. As the decade gathered steam, their economy boomed. 

The American economy today has just made an almost perfect soft landing from the pandemic craziness of mass layoffs and high inflation. Almost all measures of the economy are as good as they have been in a long time. The GDP rate has been averaging a robust 3 percent since Joe Biden took office and the country has added an incredible 14 million jobs. We now have the lowest unemployment rate since the 1960s, and the highest labor participation rates since the financial crash of 2008. There now are far more job openings than people to fill them which has kept wages growing faster than inflation, which now is stabilizing back around historic norms of 2 percent. Given the overwhelming good economic news, the stock markets are booming with the Dow Jones recently breaking 37,000 for the first time ever. 

Now add to that the impact of AI on the economy for the rest of this decade. And like in the 1920s, AI is not the only other new general purpose technology starting to scale up. We’ve got two more fundamentally new technologies that are giving humans an historic step change in our capabilities: We’ve got a whole range of clean energy technologies from solar panels to electric cars now superseding carbon energy— with the promise of clean fusion energy on the horizon. And we are also entering a new age of bioengineering that could transform healthcare and create whole new industries like synthetic biology too. 

We’re heading into a triple-whammy economic long boom. In the 1990s I coauthored a cover story for WIRED magazine and a whole book called The Long Boom and spoke for a decade about how the digital revolution combined with globalization would drive long-term growth — and did. New technologies create new industries that create new wealth and new jobs that lead to more general prosperity. Hang on for this next ride. 

Time to Figure Out the New Way Forward that Makes the Most of AI

The time has come to figure out the new way forward that fully leverages these transformative new tools. This is not the time to freak out and conjure up ways that things could go wrong in the years ahead. This is not the time to passively sit back and watch whether the development of these tools will be slowed down or not.

As The AI Age begins, we need to first figure out how we could make the most of Artificial Intelligence to build an economy and society that works better for everyone over the long haul. If AI has the real potential to boost productivity well above historic norms, and grow the economy at accelerated rates, and generate levels of prosperity not seen in decades, then how can we best unlock that potential? If AI could bring individual tutors to all students no matter their station in life (or country they were born into), then let’s start by focusing on what we would need to do to make that happen.

Figuring out the new ways forward, the positive ways forward, should be the starting point at the beginning of a new age of possibilities. That’s the reasonable first step. That’s not to say that risks should be ignored, just kept in perspective and considered at an appropriate time. Right now we’ve got the order and the emphasis backwards, with the media and public and goverment officials overwhelmingly focused on the risks rather than the many potential benefits.

The AI Age Begins event series this season hopes to counter that bias and create an ongoing forum where innovators can freely talk about the many positive things that could come about as we apply machine intelligence to all that humans now do. We’ll be creating a mostly can-do positive narrative that will contrast to the pervasive gloom and doom narrative that can be found in many other forums and media outlets.

We expect to gather techno-optimists from a wide range of backgrounds and industries and fields and build a diverse network of those who are trying to make the most of this moment. As usual, most in the tech world are jumping on the new opportunity and moving at the quickest pace. But many in the business world are not far behind in their realization of AI’s transformative power and their willingness to lean forward and take risks. And there are early adopters in almost all sectors of society who are excited by the possibilities and starting to reorient to what lies ahead.

What’s most interesting about a big historic juncture like this with a game-changing new technology is that you must truly think through new ways forward. You can’t simply fall back on old business strategies and goverment policies that were formed in the 20th century or that might have worked in an earlier tech disruption like the arrival of the internet. You really need to come to this deliberation with more like a beginner’s mind. What can this new technology now do? What can we as a business or a society now use it for? How can we make the most of it?

What’s also interesting about a juncture like this is the politics can get scrambled and create strange new political bedfellows. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to techno-optimists of all persuasions, starting with Stewart Brand of The Long Now Foundation, who has inspired everyone from Steve Jobs to today’s young entrepreneurs, and whose brand of pragmatic, independent thinking is hard to fit in one box. (I worked closely with Stewart at his company Global Business Network and consider him a mentor.)

The region’s techno-optimists range from Reid Hoffman of the blue-sky podcast Possible, more like a progressive Democrat, to Marc Andreessen of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto fame, more like a conservative Republican. And there are thought leaders and policy wonks and pundits on the left and right who are energized by the possibilities of AI and are calling for a new era of great progress, from conservative think tanker James Pethokoukis to progressive economist Noah Smith.

We’re in the very early days of a fundamental technological revolution and so we should maintain an open mind about what business leaders and government officials should do. We should create a big tent for perspectives on how to make the most of this moment: Maybe we need a light touch regulation until we understand what’s possible. Maybe we need to think about more fundamental system change on how to move this newfound wealth more equitably through society. No one political faction has all the answers. We’re at the very beginning of a long conversation to figure this all out.

Act like You are Living through a World Historic Moment

If you generally accept the premise that started this piece that the arrival of Generative AI will be understood as a world historic event, then by definition you are living through a world historic moment. Consider taking that perspective and looking at all the developments happening around you now and through the 2020s with that big-picture lens. Consider acting as if you could make a difference—because you might.

The arrival of a new general purpose technology that gives humans a step change in capabilities with the potential for many positive possibilities as well as some negative ones is a very big deal. If AI plays out roughly along the lines that I have laid out in this essay, then there are going to be many repercussions. The increased productivity and probable growth rates are going to send reverberations through the entire economy as new businesses rise and legacy players are disrupted, with many workers having to adjust to the new realities in real time. Whole new industries will emerge and new careers start and fortunes get made.

The world of commerce always reacts first to technological changes but civil society and the public sector always follow on a time lag to adapt. The so-called digital transformation is still working its way through those sectors setting up the foundation to fully exploit AI. But eventually we will see AI being applied to education, and healthcare, and government services too.

Those kind of fundamental changes in the economy and society inevitably will show up in politics as government officials and aspiring leaders will be called on to manage the transition. And this technological revolution is not just happening in America but to humans around the planet and so there will be many geopolitical ramifications as well. The artificial intelligence that China will want to develop arguably will be very different than those developed in the West. And given the power and the potential of this technology, many countries will want to play in this new game.

I think these kinds of political and geopolitical deliberations and struggles are mostly going to infuse mainstream politics later this decade. I think the 2024 political cycle in America and the many other countries holding elections this year will not engage the issue of what to do about AI. This technology is too nascent and these deliberations about what to do are just starting out.

So as The AI Age Begins, we have the time to figure out the optimal ways forward that could work better for everyone over the long haul. We can start by looking at what’s possible, and think through how to make the most of this amazing new tool. That’s what we hope to do with the 2024 next season of our event series in San Francisco. That’s what we will be chronicling in our Substack series The Great Progression too. Join us on this journey.

Let The AI Age Begin.