There are huge gulfs of opinion when it comes to predicting the near-future impacts of generative AI. In one camp there are those who predict that over the next decade the impact of AI will exceed that of the Industrial Revolution—a 150-year period of economic and social upheaval so great that we still live in the world it wrought.
At the other end of the scale we have team ‘Normal Technology’: experts who push back not only on these sorts of predictions but on their foundational worldview. That’s not how technology works, they argue.
Advances at the cutting edge may come thick and fast, but change across the wider economy, and society as a whole, moves at human speed. Widespread adoption of new technologies can be slow; acceptance slower. AI will be no different. What should we make of these extremes?
Read the full conversation between MIT Technology Review’s senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and Tim Bradshaw, FT global tech correspondent, about where AI will go next, and what our world will look like in the next five years.
This is the final edition of The State of AI, a collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Read the rest of the series, and if you want to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in the world of AI, sign up to receive our free Algorithm newsletter every Monday.
How AI is changing the economy
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