I think during the first generation of a new technology, "because it can be done" is a perhaps unprofitable but still useful learning exercise.
When the web suddenly became a big thing in 1996, I remember poking fun at the fact that every radio and TV commercial was suddenly advertising a website even though it really didn't matter. toothpaste.com? Yeah, Proctor & Gamble has owned that domain since 1995. I think there were even websites for toilet paper at the time, now that I think about it. But who cares? Who honestly goes to a website like toothpaste.com when everything you need to know about the product is printed on the product packaging? It seemed to be the latest, strangest fad that someone would actually connect their modem and pay AOL or their favorite ISP up to $14/hour to look up toothpaste!
And then there was the Network Time Protocol (NTP). I remember that if you really wanted to, you could sync your Windows 98 clock to NTP so that you would never need to reset for daylight savings again. But who cares what time it is down to the microsecond? Just because you could sync up clocks, you had to build an entire service for it? (I'm not done with this example, we'll come back to this in a moment...)
What we're seeing in AI is the birth of a new industry. Not all of it will be useful, but all of it will develop the skills and knowledge necessary- in the workforce to enable the next generation of this technology. Just as toothpaste.com has today been mostly abandoned, there will be casualties and underwear gnomes (summary of the joke - 1. steal underwear, 2. ??? 3. Profit! -- they never figured out step 2), but there will also be useful technologies that could not have existed if someone hadn't taken the first step.
Remember NTP that I mentioned? Without time synchronization, it wouldn't have been possible to issue time-sensitive RSA tokens in the mid-late 1990s, which has evolved into the various OTP technologies we use for MFA today, which are still dependent on NTP.
So, "should we, just because we can?" Not necessarily... but maybe.
There's always a rush to a new technology "in case we miss out." I sort of get that, at least in a commercial sense. One of my main concerns with AI is that there are, shall we say, "interesting" consequences when it fails. We'll find out what those are by charging ahead. Hopefully, not too many people have to die on that cross before we work out what we're doing...
I think during the first generation of a new technology, "because it can be done" is a perhaps unprofitable but still useful learning exercise.
When the web suddenly became a big thing in 1996, I remember poking fun at the fact that every radio and TV commercial was suddenly advertising a website even though it really didn't matter. toothpaste.com? Yeah, Proctor & Gamble has owned that domain since 1995. I think there were even websites for toilet paper at the time, now that I think about it. But who cares? Who honestly goes to a website like toothpaste.com when everything you need to know about the product is printed on the product packaging? It seemed to be the latest, strangest fad that someone would actually connect their modem and pay AOL or their favorite ISP up to $14/hour to look up toothpaste!
And then there was the Network Time Protocol (NTP). I remember that if you really wanted to, you could sync your Windows 98 clock to NTP so that you would never need to reset for daylight savings again. But who cares what time it is down to the microsecond? Just because you could sync up clocks, you had to build an entire service for it? (I'm not done with this example, we'll come back to this in a moment...)
What we're seeing in AI is the birth of a new industry. Not all of it will be useful, but all of it will develop the skills and knowledge necessary- in the workforce to enable the next generation of this technology. Just as toothpaste.com has today been mostly abandoned, there will be casualties and underwear gnomes (summary of the joke - 1. steal underwear, 2. ??? 3. Profit! -- they never figured out step 2), but there will also be useful technologies that could not have existed if someone hadn't taken the first step.
Remember NTP that I mentioned? Without time synchronization, it wouldn't have been possible to issue time-sensitive RSA tokens in the mid-late 1990s, which has evolved into the various OTP technologies we use for MFA today, which are still dependent on NTP.
So, "should we, just because we can?" Not necessarily... but maybe.
There's always a rush to a new technology "in case we miss out." I sort of get that, at least in a commercial sense. One of my main concerns with AI is that there are, shall we say, "interesting" consequences when it fails. We'll find out what those are by charging ahead. Hopefully, not too many people have to die on that cross before we work out what we're doing...