The Cost of Convenience

In my lifetime, less than 30 years at time of writing, I went from a cordless phone mounted on the kitchen wall to a computer in my pocket. We started grade school with pen and paper and left college right as generative AI went public. These technologies were already in development long before my time, but we experienced the public birth and widespread use of multiple life altering technologies. These social disruptors, although I believe them to be good intentioned, have left humanity struggling to adapt at the pace these technologies demand, a pace that could rupture the fabric of society.

The gap between invention and adoption is the real story. Artificial intelligence was not born in 2022. The field was founded in the summer of 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, where mathematician John McCarthy coined the term itself in a proposal he co-authored with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. It lived in labs and lecture halls for nearly seventy years before it reached the rest of us. Then ChatGPT opened to the public on November 30, 2022 and reached roughly one hundred million users in two months, the fastest adoption of any consumer application on record.

That is the pattern behind every breakthrough in this piece. The telephone took roughly eighty years to move from early adoption to near saturation in American homes. The smartphone managed it in about a decade. Generative AI managed it in a season. The breakthrough is never the disruption. The distribution is.

For most of humanity, information traveled through printed mediums. In early Egypt it was papyrus, Roman’s used slate tablets and eventually we came to leather bound hand written books. The problem that came with this, even though information became better preserved. It was still incredibly hard to transfer, to print multiple, to distribute information to the public. Throughout history we saw that effects of this inhibiting feature of knowledge, enter in the Gutenberg Press. This machine was able to print books that, at the time, was an imaginable speed. With this machine now in use and being constantly upgraded by wayfinding entrepreneurs and inventors, information become exponentially quicker. To the point where some countries even debated the legality of the Press and what it could do to their nation.

As time continued to pass, the press became more efficient. But was still limited to tactile inputs and a majority manual labor by today’s standards. Information freely passed but was bottlenecked by the fact that the information had to be on paper. Then came the internet. One of the most disrupting technologies that the human race has ever experienced, right up there next to the lightbulb and electricity. What the internet did, was more than just websites, it created an outlet of free flow information. This sparked, for lack of better words, a revolution of information freely flowing, where anything could be written in shared. Facts blurred with fiction and with the help of social networks our lives became quickly visible to others. All of this was caused by the ease of information.