The industrial revolution in the 1700s and 1800s, which shifted humans from an agrarian to a mechanized and industrial society, had been catalyst for much of the world that we live in today. But the impact of AI could be far greater.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said that the impact of AI could be 100 times the impact of the industrial revolution. He says that this impact will also occur over a smaller time-frame, giving society much lesser time to adapt to these changes.
“Any time when there’s a lot of disruption and change — we’ve had this many times in human history, the internet, mobile, etc — but before that, it was the industrial revolution,” Hassabis said on the Lex Fridman podcast. “(AI) is going to be one of those eras where there’s going to be a lot of change. There will be new jobs like we can’t even imagine today, like the jobs the internet created. And then the people with the right skillsets to ride that wave will become incredibly valuable. But maybe people will have to relearn and adapt a bit their current skills,” he added.
Hassabis then tried to quantify the impact of the AI revolution in terms of the industrial revolution. “What’s going to be harder to deal this time is, we’re going to see probably 10 times the impact of the industrial revolution had, but 10 times faster as well. So instead of a 100 years, it takes 10 years. So AI will have a 100x impact and speed combined than the industrial revolution,” Hassabis predicted.
He said that this sudden change could take some getting used to. “That’s what’s going to make it more difficult for society to deal with. There’s a lot to think about, and I encourage the top economists and philosophers to think about how society is going to be affected by this,” he added.
Other business leaders have also drawn the analogy between PCs and mobiles and AI — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that AI will produce a third wave of computing after the introduction of the computer and the mobile phone. But Hassabis seems to take things further back, and has theorized that the impact of AI could be 100x more than that of the industrial revolution. There are clear parallels between the two — the industrial revolution had automated humans’ mechanical effort — instead of individually tailoring shirts, large machines in factories could now churn out shirts cheaper and more efficiently than ever before. The AI revolution will will likely automate human intelligence — instead of humans poring over spreadsheets or writing code, AI will do their work more quickly and efficiently. The machines of the industrial revolution, much like the GPUs of today, were powered by electricity, and turned electricity into useful output.
But this does raise the question of what humans will do once the effects of the AI revolution are fully baked in. When the industrial revolution had happened, humans had shifted from doing physically-intensive tasks to mentally intensive tasks. With AI now doing mentally-intensive tasks as well, it remains to be seen what sort of useful endeavors will humans pick up in the coming years and decades.