When will average people feel AI’s impact?

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Many AI optimists tend to compare what is happening in this AI boom to the industrial revolution, or to other periods of rapid technological advancement and diffusion into society. These comparisons fit on the scale of technological change, but miss a crucial factor in how most people are exposed to that change. The problem facing AI is that most people have no super tangible new goods thanks to it and society has more inertia resisting change than in previous eras.

I’m writing this coming back online from a few weeks off for my wedding in New England. In this time it would have been very easy to not think about AI at all. The touch-points that average people have to AI products today are fringe, marginally beneficial, or even just very confusing to them (e.g. many people have heard about and brought up the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident, but don’t know what to make of it). People on the positive side think of AI as a way to make fun images, enhanced Google Search, etc. These are very small benefits. On the negative side is an association with addictive social media algorithms, friends of friends addicted to AI chatbots, and a plethora of takes on data centers.

AI is still a rounding error in everyday life

Core aspects of everyday life — family, food, transportation, and entertainment — have few direct impacts yet. It’s a remarkable breath of fresh air to pop out of the bubble and realize how little what is happening really matters today. Being obsessed with AI is a choice that a very few people have yet opted into. For example, the only thing I used AI for in this time was search and creative work (making the pretty seating chart for my wedding guests to find their table).

In industrial revolutions past, average people got absolutely life changing outcomes. The First Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century gave access to cheaper clothing, cooking ware, reading material, and a shift to new livelihoods. The Second Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century introduced household machines (e.g. sewing machines), preserved food, indoor plumbing, photography, better light sources, bicycles, and further benefits of manufactured goods and electrification. The list is remarkable — most of these we still use regularly today — and very physical.

While even the most optimistic versions of AI will usher in new scientific discoveries, advanced therapeutics for rare diseases, and potentially even sustained economic abundance, these benefits have the risk of being too indirect.

How will a common citizen come to credit OpenAI or Anthropic for saving their life, if they went to their family doctor who told them about a new miracle cure?

What percentage of Americans will care about OpenAI solving the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem?

It feels very likely in 50 years that the average American’s day to day life looks very similar. Their home, appliances, relationships, and vehicles will be similar (of course, self-driving will continue to diffuse, but that has been developing on a very independent trajectory from the innovations of LLMs). In this time, AI will get a lot of credit. 50 years is a remarkable length of time with how fast everything is changing today in this, AI-focused narrow slice of the world.

The most important part of what is happening early in the AI revolution, is building foundational infrastructure, and a general process, which will compound over decades. A major mathematical breakthrough today will look astonishingly minor in scope relative to the advancements that come later in the compounding journey. It is hard to predict what it looks like for every technology you use daily to get faster compounding improvements due to AI.

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