Artificial Intelligence and Amara's Law ..

In the continued experience of technology and the challenges, we have come across one more law, it is Amara’s Law (named after the scientist and futurist Roy Charles Amara (1925-2007)):

Amara's law sates that,

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it's effect in the long run.

In the short run, humans tend to overestimate the impact of technologies, we tell great things about technologies, what it can accomplish and so on. The technology takes time to be assimilated among the population and the growth is really incremental in the initial stages. But in the long run, all the small deltas (increments) get added up and the impact is really great.

In the graph below, we plot time on the X axis and the impact of the modern technologies on the Y axis. (Image credit Shubham Vyas, IIT Guwahati)

As an example, when Internet got introduced in the commercial world in the late 90s, we predicted the great impact it would have on humanity but we saw the great dotcom bust and our short term dreams all went bust by 2004. But not losing heart, the Internet usage and applications got wider and wider acceptance and we see in just 25 years, it is penetrated all aspects of human life, from health, finance, commerce, education, news, banking , what not .. !!

Similarly we understand that the new technologies of AI, Virtual Reality and Autonomous Vehicles are benefiting humanity in increments presently, as it is in the evolutionary stage, but in the long run will provide revolutionary benefits. It will change the way we interact and deal with each other, with nature, our environment, our surroundings and with machines.

The impact of AI technologies on humanity will be profound in the long run ..

That day is not far at all, maybe in the next 20 years ..

George ..