We’ll Be Waiting For a While…
Yesterday Fred posted about voice input over on AVC, and it reminded me how long it takes for consumers to adopt truly new behaviors, regardless of how enthusiastic we might get about a particular technology’s potential. As Fred points out, voice input has been around for a decade or so, and yet just a fraction of us use it for much more than responding to texts or emails on our phones.
While tens of millions of us have begun to use generative AI in various ways, its “paradigm shifting” impacts are likely years away. That’s because while consumers would love to have AI genies flitting around negotiating complex tasks on our behalf, first an ecosystem of developers and entrepreneurs will have to do the painstaking work of clearing the considerable brush which clogs our current technology landscape — and it’s not even certain they’ll be able to.
Some historical context is worth considering. When the World Wide Web hit in 1993, I was convinced this new platform would change everything about, well, everything. Culture, business, government — all would be revolutionized. 1993 was the year Wired first published, and we took to the technology with abandon. We launched Hotwired, one of the first commercial websites, in 1994- but quickly realized the limitations of the early Web. There was no way to collect payment, serve advertising, or even identify who was visiting the…
