Futurist Amy Webb sees a “high-tech cycle” heading our way
By Tim Brinkhof | Published: 2024-11-03 22:36:00 | Source: The Future – Big Think
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
During the 2000s, a group of non-profit organizations began organizing programming workshops for unemployed coal miners from West Virginia. Futurist and author Amy Webb explained the plan MIT EMTech 2024The goal of the conference, an annual conference on emerging technologies, was to retrain disenfranchised workers in a dying industry into “expert programmers ready to be hired into high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley.” It didn’t work. Not because the workshops were poorly run, or because the miners weren’t interested, but because they learned the wrong thing: HTML.
“Sure, HTML is the language that powers the Internet, but it’s also basically been automated since 2018,” Webb explained. “It’s nice to know how to do it, but it’s not essential.” He was “Artificial intelligence was on the horizon at that time.” If retraining had been organized around this topic, it would have been easier for some miners to change their profession. Unlike many coal mining companies, which may have stubbornly refused to invest in alternative sources of revenue — such as converting their facilities into efficient underground data storage centers — the coaches bet on the future trend, but not the right one.
“Why talk about all this?” Webb asked her audience. “Because I worry that what happened in West Virginia will happen anywhere else in the world.”
She predicts that we are on the cusp of a “high-tech cycle,” in which advances in three increasingly complementary and interconnected areas of research—artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and smart sensors—will transform our economy and society to a similar extent like the wheel and the steam engine. In an interview with Freethink, she revealed how companies and entrepreneurs can identify – and capitalize on – investment opportunities that have yet to materialise.
“I’m concerned that what happened in West Virginia will happen anywhere else in the world.”
Amy Webb
Supercycle explained
“Our methodology is fairly robust,” Webb says of her company, the Future Today Institute, which provides strategic insight to corporate strategists. “We don’t look at news headlines, but rather at investment patterns, academic journals, and trademarks of patents.” The first signs of an upcoming supercycle appeared between 2017 and 2018, when Webb was researching her book The Big Nine: How Tech Giants and Their Thinking Machines Could Distort Humanity. “I saw that a lot of companies working in AI were also investing in biotechnology and synthetic biology.”
The next question was: Why? Although at first glance these areas seem to have little in common, closer examination suggests that breakthroughs in one will lead to breakthroughs in the others, and vice versa. “When you combine AI and biology, what researchers can do in the lab is nowhere near what they can do with this additional technology,” Webb tells Freethink. “They can do simulations and use robots much more efficiently. Just look at synthetic biology, which takes existing organisms and invents new organisms to achieve new and enhanced purposes. You can’t do that without intelligence.” Artificial and robotics. “You need help.”
“Just as biotechnology requires AI, AI also requires intelligent sensors: “AI is the foundational layer of the supercycle, but we will need advanced sensors to bring in the data that AI needs to function. One of the challenges facing large language models today is that they are trained using openly available data. At this point, almost all major companies have completely scrapped the Internet. To get more AI, we will need real-world data, visual data and video data, which will enable us to move from language models to… an act “Models.”
This brings Webb to the third, and arguably least appreciated, element in the coming technology supercycle: smart sensors. Webb predicts that smart glasses and implantable brain-computer interfaces will become more popular in the coming years, and not just because our favorite gadget — the smartphone — has reached a well-documented milestone. For large language models like ChatGPT to improve, they require other sources of data than publicly available information online. Smart glasses, like those Recently introduced By Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg AI can provide data about our real-world environments, helping them become more sophisticated.
Brave new world
Researchers at the Future Today Institute use the acronym CIPHER — “contradictions, anomalies, practices, breakthroughs, extremes, and rarities” — to identify transformative trends in the technology sector. These six criteria, when observed together, indicate that a particular phenomenon is not just a temporary fad, but a real long-term trend.
“Do you remember early social media platforms like Foursquare?” Webb says when asked to provide an example of this fad. “You could go somewhere, check your mobile app, and then get a digital badge. At first, everyone thought these badges were the future. It was a fad, and people were talking a lot about it. But it was just a method, not a real trend. The real trend was actually very boring, but also very important: it was location-based services.”
Studying past fads can help us identify trends today: “Right now, everyone thinks of generative AI in terms of a chatbot experience, which it currently is, but the longer-term trend is more about using different types of data from different sources and interacting with that data in different ways.”
Although it’s hard to imagine right now, services like ChatGPT are only the beginning of the AI boom, not the end of it. AI robots in the future will not rely solely on text; You’ll be able to see and interact with them, while they’ll be able to interact with you, your apps, and your immediate surroundings. This is the future that companies and entrepreneurs must prepare for.
Investment strategies
When asked how companies can ride the high-tech wave, rather than get swallowed up by the tide, Webb’s response was both simple and sophisticated. In short, they should do the opposite of what those mining companies did: cut back on services that are bound to become obsolete, and invest in new sources of revenue that the supercycle will create.
The problem, she tells Freethink, is that many companies whose business models are threatened by innovation are just innovating. “For example, we are starting to see a lot of companies cutting back on transportation expenses, including airlines and aerospace companies. The problem is that they are not reinvesting in the future, which means that the problems they face today are likely to become bigger tomorrow.”
Aside from developing strong business strategies, those hoping to capitalize on the high-tech cycle must also anticipate the reaction of other players in the field, from Big Tech to bureaucrats in Washington. Government regulation of innovative technologies – especially artificial intelligence – is a particularly important topic to consider, not least because machine learning will play a larger, more intrusive, and therefore controversial, role in both the economy and our individual lives.
An effective and sustainable approach to regulating AI has yet to be found. Lack of regulation may lead to the formation of monopolies, protect companies from accountability, and exacerbate the unequal distribution of new technologies at the national and international levels. But over-regulation can also be harmful, as it stifles innovation, reinforces existing leaders, and incentivizes companies to set up branches in places where they are free from oversight. Both of these extremes serve to hinder rather than enable the supercycle, slowing the development of new technologies and limiting the positive impact they can have on society.
Rather than focusing on regulation, as was the case in the EU, Webb argues for economic incentives that “force companies to make the right decisions,” adding that “the concept of regulation and policy making as it exists today was created before we had all these game-changing technologies,” which is as compelling evidence as any that something must change.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a baby boomer or a millennial. Every person alive is part of the transition generation.”
Amy Webb
Although much has been written about how new technologies and services are supposed to exacerbate societal problems rather than solve them — think of social media platforms that contribute to political polarization and the spread of misinformation rather than bringing their users together — Webb believes that with the right attitudes and intentions, the coming supercycle could actually restore a long-lost sense of togetherness.
“As we enter this cycle of change, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a boomer or a millennial. Every person alive is part of a generation that’s transitioning. We could make better choices or do what the coal mines did: stick to our feet and try to maintain the status quo, and end up in a very difficult situation as a result.”
this condition Originally published by our sister site Freethink.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
