There’s a lot of debate on how to capitalize on the success of generative-AI large-language-models like ChatGPT. While clever scientists and engineers are working to optimize the cost-basis of running these models, content creators and patent/license/copyright trolls alike are worrying about how they get paid. Content creators worry when the possibilities for competition just went exponential, or their past content is repurposed within an AI that largely obfuscates the sources. Patent trolls worry for the obfuscated sources.

Are we looking at it all wrong? If we simply accept AI-generated content as the statistically-amalgamated regurgitation-machine-expulsion that it is – can we stop looking to extend old ideas of revenue and instead use the shiny new tools to enhance our own capabilities and create new paths to revenue? After all, Napster vs Record Companies still concluded with iTunes, Spotify, Pandora…

Creativity is dead. The rebirth of creativity. AI seeds, not trees.

Maybe we need to cite an “alternative reference” concept of where to get these ideas? As a musician I can often list which bands I liked whose general vibe made it into a new song I wrote. Sometimes not. As a software architect I can usually very roughly trace a path through the various things I’ve learned and how they inform a new design – but I also realize some of the dots being connected are uniquely mine. So – they are all “influences” for me.

Rather than citing references in an AI model, we could instead consider them influences as a writer or an artist would see it?

Another thought. If the AI became equivalently proficient in the creation of music as it has been of late with words and then perhaps we would see/hear this argument differently.

Once, stories were told from one person to the next, and knowledge was passed.

Eventually, letters and words and it got easier. People would read and summarize, reference and write anew. Their ideas were magnified when the printing press came around. The snowball was rolling down the hill.

A bit later the internet dramatically shifted how knowledge and creative endeavors could be shared. Suddenly everyone could publish their ideas.

Enter generative AI. It’s been trained on all of the above. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Smart and dumb.  It doesn’t know the difference. Don’t be fooled into thinking it does.

A part of me initially worried about this scary new world. If people stop creating and start simply using this extra clever regurgitation/synthesis machine, it will be the death of creativity, right? Of original content! And for lazy folks, that may be true, but what would they have achieved anyhow?.

What if, instead, the basic building blocks of knowledge and creativity have been leveled up in a nearly incomprehensible way?

Setting aside all the lawyers who have drawn their swords. Leaving behind all the content creators who think they deserve a piece of any wins they can get on a suddenly, much longer content derivative versus fair use argument.

Allowing all of that to be the squeaky wheels of real change, can we envision a reality where the baseline of knowledge, or at least awareness of knowledge, has been exponentially leveled up?

This is only the beginning. Run toward the explosion to succeed.

No generative language models were used in the writing of this post, including ChatGPT.  Though maybe it would be better if they had.

And except for the top image, which was generated via Invoke-AI Stable-Diffusion invoker.

Why do technologies languish? Why do they boom? What happens in between? 

Leaps

While each story of technology growth carries its own unique details, it is commonly perceived that wildly successful tech “came out of nowhere”. Of course this is nonsense, and whether you check in now, a decade ago, a hundred or a thousand years ago, every “leap” is a painstaking endeavor of many years, usually by many people. So far as I know, this is without exception. Edison had 2,332 patents to his name. Brilliant man to be sure, but everything he produced he started by learning from the writings of his predecessors in his fields of interest.

Most of “the greats” were of course brilliant. Leaps are leaps because of these abilities to connect dots. But by and large any of the amazing things you take for granted are the effort of decades and even centuries of research, learning, trying a thousand things, and finally making an inch of progress.

That’s the way apparent “leaps” take place. What about the other situation? The case where the key components of a “leap” are all present, but the will to make the leap is suppressed by the inertia of existing industry? This is not referring to the case of modestly equivalent technologies succeeding simply because of better marketing plans or downright dirty tricks – e.g. the VHS/Betamax debate et al. This is not the case of “both are good, some like one more than the other” – coke vs. pepsi, android vs iphone. 

Motivation & Opportunity vs The Bottom Line

What I’m talking about is real industry inertia, fealty to near-term bottom lines, the root cause of unethical exercise of capitalism. For years, even decades, we possessed the ability to make electric cars. The technology existed. Prototypes were made. I’ve seen cars that run not only on electricity, but also on compressed air, steam, kinetic flywheels, and hydrogen. I’m sure there’s others. Some of these designs were truly viable. None were mass produced or even attempted a consumer market push. 

Why did Tesla succeed? Because co-founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did not ask permission. They didn’t try to convince one of the big auto makers to start making the product based on their designs. They sought buy-in from investors with vision. They found the money, the vision, the desire, and they got to work. They made electric cars sexy, premium, desirable. Expensive. 

Now, they are trying to make them affordable. Now they have proven there is a market. They are stumbling. The cars aren’t rolling off the line like they thought they would. People are buying, and waiting 18 months for a car. Crazy! What if they can’t get it together? What if they go bankrupt trying to staunch their production woes, and simply can’t pull it off? What if all the silly press about them failing becomes a reality?

They still succeeded.

Not to their shareholders, not to their employees I’m sure – but to history. To the planet. 

What is the Measure of Success?

Ford, Toyota, GM, Volkswagon…etc – the big car companies – the ones who couldn’t stave off profits and shareholder payouts for the duration it would have taken to retool their amazing production line capabilities to produce electric cars – these guys now realize they are losing business because of Tesla. So [just about every single one of them is producing, or has produced, at least one model of electric car](http://mashable.com/2017/10/03/electric-car-development-plans-ford-gm/). The race is on to make electric vehicles viable. To make distribution of charging stations as commonplace as fuel pumps. Finally, these guys have been hit hard enough in the bottom line, or at least can see it coming, that they are galvanized to action.

If they can’t react to fears of global warming and planetary destruction, at least they can react to market share reduction and government restrictions on emission levels.

So even if Tesla goes belly up, and Elon Musk has to come and sleep on my couch while he writes the next Paypal, Tesla has succeeded beyond my wildest imaginings. They moved an immovable object. Galvanized an industry (by becoming the competition). Proved a market. One might even say, in the longer term, they have changed the world.  

So whether they are historically seen more in the light of Lise Meitner, a crucial scientist in the understanding of nuclear fission, and who is completely unknown by the general public, or Thomas Edison who invented half of modern technology, I can only see them as a wild success. 

As quickly as possible: Augmented Reality is the experience of projected information into/onto the physical world, as perceived by a user with an AR-capable device such as a handset or headset. This information can be anything a computer can generate: directions, names, a pretend cup of coffee, zombies. Anything.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the sleeper/creeper technology of the last decade. While VR took off on the Great Technology Hype Rocket, AR has languished in the public space. Giant companies with lots of money quietly worked on things that they needed for their business, or in some cases like Microsoft Hololens, just bit the bullet and decided to be first to market with a super high cost giant-headset solution. This is NOT a knock to the Hololens, which is perfectly cool in its own right – but – somebody had to be first. Somebody had to just start developing this technology commercially so it can start the cycle of improvements.

Why?

Because AR is the future. AR is not a toy, a gadget, hype, a parlor trick, a kiosk widget, or a new gaming platform. AR is the future of the human/machine interface. We have been seeing the potential for this in the movies for a long time. Minority Report comes to mind for many when they hear about AR. Maybe even something like Robocop with the bio readouts and intent of the people in front of him. 

Regardless of which fictional scenario comes to mind, the advantages of this “virtually” unlimited new paradigm of interfacing with machines should be self evident.

Imagine instructions that build the thing you are making while you are making it, always one step ahead, removing the guesswork.

Imagine seeing the building across the street that is just a bunch of beams, in it’s projected final form.

Imagine glancing at your ingredients for dinner and being able to watch them come together, or perhaps a nice suspended alert that lets you know you are overcooking the carrots right now.

Imagine a world where people all wear contact lenses or glasses that superimpose useful information/graphics into their daily experience in ways that enhance their own interests and capacities – you know, like a cellphone except everybody doesn’t need to be walking around with their heads down anymore.

It should be mentioned that AR capabilities alone are not the only reason this technology is cresting. The massive improvements in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that have enabled voice-to-text to not suck, and impact most areas of our digital life in ways we don’t even know, also power the AR capabilities that make it a viable consumer solution/medium.

For all that AR + AI sounds like a big scary electronic future, if you really consider the effective result – it is giving us our humanity back from the dominance of the handheld – in particular once headsets are viable, reasonably priced, and socially acceptable. It gives us back looking at each other, and looking around our environment. It gives us back eye contact – although one probably can’t be certain the other person is making eye contact with you, and not a superimposed AR alien…

This year saw the release of Apple’s ARKit, and Google’s ARCore, and with those, the recognition that “hey, attractive AR-enabling eyeware isn’t yet available – but AR can still be useful, lets get to it!” We build on these tools, and the hands free version can’t be far behind.

So let’s all get really good at AR so they stop trying to build chips that wire directly into your brain…