There is probably no better time to start writing blog posts about technology, strategy and society than now. The technological world is at a tipping point, and what comes next will either be seriously “semi-fun” or a complete disaster for the global economy. The reason is simple: AI is far from what it has been made out to be over the last 24 months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
To start with – for those who don’t know me yet – I’m pro-technology through and through. I’ve spent the last 10 years of my professional life working primarily with AI, much longer than AI was generally considered “cool” and the “next big thing for humanity”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That doesn’t qualify me to know better per se, but what I have learned during this time is this: Building a technology that can theoretically do a lot is one thing, but adapting and applying this technology on a large scale is something completely different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes! No! Oh wait?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n When new technologies are suddenly noticed by a broad section of the population, the same thing always happens:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The current AI hype is no different. The spark that ignited everything was the combination of large language models with the chat window. Although language models were nothing new by far, the combination, this new “natural” interaction with computers, was something groundbreaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the first time, the general public was able to communicate easily with computers. You could ask a question – like on the Starship Enterprise, so to speak – and actually get an answer. This answer was and is often not necessarily correct and\/or precise in terms of content, but it sounded so good and well-rounded that even cognitively hardened contemporaries thought it was “totally great”. The experience was groundbreaking, the content “sub-par”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Don’t get me wrong, of course we saw and still see a leap in the capabilities of AI models, but it wasn’t that surprising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Autonomy vs. automation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What was new was the attention it generated. My mother suddenly came around the corner and told me about the new AI. For people who were involved with these technologies, there was a feeling of “now everything is possible, now everything is changing”. That was – and still is – the general narrative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And AI providers have gratefully embraced this narrative and underpinned it with economic fantasies. First and foremost the fantasy that it could completely replace human labor. I agree (and have for a very long time btw) that sooner or later we will get to the point where what we define as work in 2026 will be done entirely by autonomous software systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But not tomorrow and certainly not today. Everyone who works professionally with this technology knows that. The hurdles and challenges are manifold, and I think I will go into them in detail in future articles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n