What you'll learn:
- AI's disruptive impact on society.
- How AI has revolutionized communications.
- AI's expansion into electronics system control.
Simply put, artificial intelligence is just the most recent breakthrough in a long series of developments in the evolution of our intelligent electronic ecosystem. Just as every technological advance of the last 70 years or so has done, AI is propagating through society in paths that echo those of solutions past. Looking at how those gains disrupted and advanced society may provide us with tips to help understand where the new reality is taking us.
According to Grand View Research, the AI marketplace was worth roughly US$196.63 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 36.6% from 2024 to 2030. The advantages in deploying an AI-empowered solution are so great that it will be almost impossible to not participate in this new and rapidly growing industry. Some of the societal impact of technologies like AI stem directly from the financial upheaval created by the market migration.
The Disruptive Nature of AI
Technological disruption and societal impact aren't new things, obviously. We've barely managed to integrate the first industrial revolution into our society (and not very well, IMO). In one sense, every advance since then has been to add automation, intelligence, functionality, and power density to existing systems, and AI is just another upward step in the process.
The disruption caused by the integration of AI into society mirrors in some ways the technological strides made in the past, but also adds more depth and complexity to the situation due to its progressive nature.
Such breakthroughs have always disrupted society, with some of the largest disruptions coming from advances that increase an individual’s ability to interact with others. For example, radio, and subsequently TV, changed society in many ways, as people had the ability to share both information and disinformation.
The same could be said for desktop publishing (or the printing press itself) or any other technology providing a force-multiplier in communications. In addition, the core technologies involved often created, or were a part of, other disruptions in other aspects of society.
Rapid Convergence of Communications and Intelligence
This evolution of wireless communications and intelligent electronic systems has led us on a rapid journey forward. Such progress occurs at an ever-accelerating pace as the various maturing technologies converge and leverage themselves into even more sophisticated systems and solutions.
Old-school thin-client systems became desktop PCs, foreshadowing the migration from a server-centric philosophy to computing at the edge. AI in one way is just another progression in this decentralization of intelligence in electronic systems.
The disruption brought about by advanced communications is currently manifested in social media, the ultimate empowerment of the individual as content creator. The social-media revolution had been tempered to a degree due to the meritocracy of entertainment, as one must not only distribute content, they need to make content compelling enough to engage people.
The period of disruptive change fomented by AI is directly related to its ability to give individuals the ability to more effectively interact with society, using these advanced capabilities to better reach and influence the public. The added twist in this chapter of human development is that in addition to the automation of information distribution, AI can also automate the creation of content. This added level of functionality is what makes AI such a disruptive force in modern society.
AI's Expanding Role in Electronics Management
There is, of course, a significant number of spaces outside of the public marketplace of information, entertainment, and ideas where AI is making a revolutionary impact. These are in “benign” applications where the AI is used for its ability to monitor, control, and manage advanced electronic systems.
Having an AI optimize the performance of an industrial process can be disruptive to society, but not in the direct way a deepfake video can. This dichotomy in AI capabilities and implementation isn't foreign to technology disruption, as it is a poor knife that can only cut in one direction. All technology is used for both good and evil.
One could make the argument that AI is the peak of electronic development, and that other advances like quantum computing will only speed up processes and increase logic capability. However, AI and quantum computing could represent the next phase of human development, as the potential for such a system to achieve self-awareness is not out of the question.
That will probably be farther away than the foreseeable future, though it may arrive sooner than we expect. Once we have a quantum-based AI, we may have to completely reevaluate where we are as a species. Or maybe we’ll just have better video games.
