AI's Ubiquity

­With our new arbitrary period of measuring one revolution around the sun upon us, it’s worth taking a closer look at the hottest tech since wide band-gap semiconductors – artificial intelligence.

We all know it’s a big deal, and if you’ve been on social media at all in the past several years, it’s impossible to avoid. Hey Grok, draw me based on my altogether indifference to generative AI.

But it’s not just kitschy pics of Joe Schmoe as Captain Planet or answering the eternal mystery of Karen’s questionable haircut. It’s taking over the consumer world, one application at a time.

Regular CES attendees – or anyone who’s checked their e-mail anytime recently – have been inundated with all things AI, and everyone’s asking about the “next big thing.” While we might be tempted to say “more AI”, we’d be missing the point.

I’d argue that AI is slowly going the way of the Internet – ubiquitous and seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. The ‘90s notion of “signing on” to the net is quaint nostalgia, and the same will be true for artificial intelligence.

To start with, AI will have a monumental impact on the global economy. McKinsey Global Institute claims that AI will be worth $2.6 to $4.4 trillion annually, worldwide, with AI’s overall economic impact increasing by 15 to 40%.

And while Goldman Sachs sees generative AI increasing the global GDP by $7 trillion, there’s also cause for concern – Goldman predicts that “two-thirds of U.S. occupations will be affected by AI-powered automation”, while McKinsey feels AI will “automate half of all work between 2040 and 2060.”

I suppose it’s not all doom and gloom – we’ve experienced industrial revolutions before, with all the intrinsic automation and “job-killers”, but there’s something uniquely unsettling about tech that’s not only smarter than humans, but is learning to fool them. Just the fact that AI learns on its own and isn’t still 100% beholden to its human creators is cause for concern.

Though, again, the industry is jumping at AI’s potential and presumably hoping to downplay its darker tendencies. Much like HTTP – and even electricity – Deloitte Insights sees AI “becoming so ubiquitous that it will be a part of the unseen substructure of everything we do, and we eventually won’t even know it’s there.”

Like the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything). We won’t think about AI as a separate entity because it’ll be seamlessly woven into everything.

“We won’t ‘use’ AI,” says Deloitte. “We’ll just experience a world where things work smarter, faster, and more intuitively—like magic, but grounded in algorithms.”

More of that and less of killer robots and humanity’s obsolescence.