Why does AI feel so different?

Summary

A lot is changing with AI. It’s been confusing, and slightly overwhelming, for me to get a grip on what’s changing, and what it all means for me personally, for my job, and for humanity. What’s going to happen in the next 5 years? Will my skills be relevant? How do I truly add value with AI getting smarter in every way? How does it change life for me and my family? It doesn’t fit into any of my existing mental models. I use it in every aspect of life already, and the inability to understand it in a similar way to anything in the past makes me feel unsettled. So, I’m writing to break it down, and create a mental model that does work. For myself. And maybe for others out there dealing with all of this too. It’s a new General Purpose Technology (GPT) Andrew Ng popularised “AI is the new electricity”. It’s not just any random analogy about a future possibility, it’s a well researched reality. It’s useful to understand what this really means. When science results in a breakthrough like the steam engine, or electricity, or the internet, or the transformer, it’s called a paradigm shift, or a scientific revolution. Thomas Kuhn defines and explains this well, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962. And the paradigm shifts in AI as a science, have been studied via Kuhn’s framework in 2012, and 2023. However, a paradigm shift in science also causes paradigm shifts in engineering. Engineering rethinks its assumptions, methods, and goals. It can both use the new technology, and build the next order of technology on top of it, causing the ripple effect that leads to the birth of entire industries and economies. While Kuhn doesn’t go into it, the technological diffusion, and the economic impact of scientific revolutions are better studied through the GPT (general purpose technology) paper from Bresnahan & Trajtenberg in 1995. “General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) are technologies that can affect an entire economy (usually at a national or global level). They have the pote...