We’re all injecting AI into so many aspects of our life that we’re unsure now whether we’re engaging with a person or their GPT prompt. What a time. For my generation, we saw the birth and take-over of the internet to now the birth of AI. It feels like it did back then. Except now I’m older. But still driven by an often irrational desire to solve problems.
I’ve often looked at this blog as a place to share a deeper dive into something I’m experiencing, in the hope it is something I can look back at and serve someone curious enough to look. My first time publishing something on here was 2014. A cool 11 years. And now, as I gaze around at the marvels that AI tech is offering people, I’m more aware of what this personal blog is. A place to share my voice. As someone who’s always loved reading and writing, this was the place I did that. As I oscillate between the ups and downs of life.
I’ve avoided story-telling in other mediums (video) and have been almost invisible across social platforms. Whilst I regret nothing, I admit I’ve made a heck of a lot of mistakes and epic fails. Not being mindful of where I share my thoughts and engage with other humans is certainly one of them. I’m going to keep this blog for my unassisted words. It’ll be as seldom as it is now but will be what it was always meant to be: unfiltered thoughts, albeit a little more condensed. As for other platforms, it’s time to corral attention where attention is; LinkedIn, X, TikTok.. perhaps even Instagram. In the service of myself and what we’re building.
As I look around through my lens of a decade long career of building companies, I often measure the tools around me as how they impact the cost to create. The internet made creating things faster, cheaper and easier than ever before. My parent’s generation filled in paperwork and signed cheques. That cost to create is now well on its way to becoming even lower now across the next decade.
But whilst I have instinctively found myself creating things, I am a serial consumer. And it’s actually my consumption that has often driven me to figure out I needed to create something to solve a problem I have or notice exists in a space around me.
With the prolific rise of AI tech, I see a world where the cost to consume things is going to become lower than it ever has in the history of humankind. When artificial intelligence becomes super intelligence, why would we choose the risk of human error to be factored into the things we consume? What happens when a near flawless super intelligence is able to fly a plane? It is likely by then also building one, engineering one and servicing one too. Air travel will eventually cost what it costs us to fill up a tank of gas. I reference air travel because today another Airline tragically malfunctioned and all except one person aboard were killed (Air India 171 to London). May all their souls rest in peace.
This cost to consume applies to everything. If AI is already capable of taking a simple sentence and turning it into rich video, clone faces and audio… the applications of a technology this smart will mean that the cost to consume will see a transformational change never seen before.
We all consume and create. There has been no time in recorded history when consumers have an opportunity to create so painlessly. The building blocks for a truly sci-fi advancement in society is here. The gap between consume vs create has never been as close together as it is now.