This is not going to be a particularly “financial” or market-facing article.
Instead, it's going to be a personal reflection on the proliferation of modern AI tools - what is commonly referred to as “generative” AI.
It might also be seen as an optimistic riposte to Alex’s article, in which he presented a “bear case against AI”.
Firstly, some context.
I am 40 years old. This means that I remember life before the internet. I remember life before smartphones. I remember life before Windows, Google, YouTube, and Facebook.
If I had to name which one of those had the most profound effect on my day-to-day life, it would probably be Google.
But back in the early days (1998-2004), it wasn't initially clear which search engine was the best.
We had AltaVista, Yahoo! and probably others I’ve forgotten about by now. AltaVista was the one that I used the most, for several years.
Eventually, that changed. My perception - broadly shared - was that Google was cleaner. Google was faster. And Google’s results were more relevant.
And so it was that all of humanity’s wisdom (or at least all of it that had been uploaded to a public server somewhere) became readily available, and deliverable to us in a split second.
I was in secondary school and then starting university around this time. The ability to Google something quickly became an art form in itself. It suddenly became possible to answer (almost) any question far, far faster than anyone in history had ever been able to do so before.
In my early career, the ability to rapidly find the answer to almost anything was definitely a skill that I leaned on. Knowing the right keywords, and figuring out the right phrasing for a query, would mean getting much better results than someone else. Of course Google was ubiquitous at this point, and everybody was Googling all of the time.
All of which is to emphasise the revolutionary nature of what Google did.
And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that generative AI is now having a similar effect on humanity as the search engine did.
Generative AI: a search engine on steroids
It should be clear from the above that I’m not…
