The idea of AI has been floating around for decades, but it’s only in the past few years that we’ve really started to see it come to life. As it turns out, the historical ideas of how AI was going to work had everything backward.
It can be hard to see that far into the future.
It’s kind of like when Marty McFly visited 2015 (from 1985) in “Back to the Future Part II”. The movie created wild visions of what 2015 might be like but they missed the biggest one — cell phones. If you watch the movie, not a single person in 2015 has a cell phone in their hand. To be fair, there were very few people who could have predicted that, but it feels very strange from our viewpoint in time.
It’s similar with AI. If you look back to shows like “The Jetsons”, they had a clear vision of the future — they had Rosie the robot to do all of the housework, but George had to push buttons all day long to help build space sprockets. Today is exactly the inverse.
In a recent episode of Guy Kawasaki’s “Remarkable People” podcast, he had a show featuring Bill Gates and his thoughts on the state of the world. It was an excellent episode and I encourage you to give it a listen, but one thing that Gates said really stood out to me:
“It was widely assumed that AI and robots would come for warehouse work first, not writing legal briefs and code.”
While there are some warehouse-capable robots, most of that work is still done by humans. Conversely, writing code and legal briefs are tasks that are relatively simple for today’s AI models to handle. It’s not super clear-cut, but it’s certainly far from the “robots will do chores first, and write code much later” idea that most people had running around their minds.
It seems likely to balance out in the coming years, but it’s super interesting that things started this way instead of the way that everyone assumed it would unfold.
