Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded into the mainstream, largely through chatbots and agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Users can now have real-time conversations with multimodal AI tools that understand your text, voice, and images – even documents! The progress has been mind blowing, and tech companies are racing to integrate AI features into their products.
AI features today are being released with obvious interfaces and promoted heavily. My prediction though is that the future of AI will increasingly lean toward hidden, unnoticeable improvements to our daily experiences.
Visible AI – Current State
In our haste to compete, most AI tools today share a similar experience: either a chatbot interface or a feature trigger. What started as fresh and magical is becoming repetitive and forced.
ChatGPT, Bard, Claude… They all share the same conversational interface, resembling many lackluster customer service chatbots. The great ones now offer multimodal capabilities like voice or video input, but the concept is the same – back-and-forth dialogue.
Meanwhile, operating systems, web browsers, word processors, and other apps are tacking on AI features. Typically, these are triggered through a cool new AI icon to generate, summarize, or improve your content.
Invisible Enhancements – Yesterday & Today
Machine Learning (ML), on the other hand, has typically been rolled out as behind-the-scenes improvements that exponentially raise user expectations. Most users don’t even realize what ML processes are at play! Nearly invisible algorithms have transformed industries.
Google revolutionized search with its deceptively simple interface – a single search box delivering surprisingly targeted results. YouTube and Netflix ushered in streaming video, but they gained more attention surrounding their advanced recommendation engines. No more wandering the aisles of the local video store and reading the back of DVD cases!
The banking industry’s automated fraud detection is another perfect example of unobtrusive features. Instead of combing through your bank statement, you are notified in real time that your bank card has been disabled and the funds returned.
AI Ubiquity – Future State
AI is not going away – it offers tremendous opportunities for both businesses and consumers. Like subscription services where businesses cut costs and increase revenue, while the consumers enjoy better experiences, convenience, and options.
However, as with subscription services (access vs ownership), there are trade-offs. AI introduces trust issues, ethical concerns, and bias. Even so, the benefits are likely to outweigh the downsides. AI will reduce cognitive load in your daily life and have a far more natural interaction with digital systems. With AI, exciting products and benefits will be introduced.
Industries like healthcare, finance, automotive, retail, and energy are already exploring AI applications. At first these will be noticeable additions, but over time, AI will become seamlessly integrated and nearly invisible.
Conclusion
There will be bumps along the way (we should learn from our past). Legal disputes and unethical practices are inevitable, but progress will continue. We’ll need to get through some of the bad to reap the benefits – in the same way that fire is crucial to society but can also be destructive – we learn from our mistakes and move forward. Human creativity and innovation have brought us this far, and now we will integrate AI to amplify our potential.
I’m excited to see what is yet to come! We humans get nervous about game-changing technologies, but history shows that we are adept at adding safeguards and correcting our course. I think we’re going to surprise ourselves.
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