Like most business leaders these days, I am obsessed with the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Not a day goes by without the promise or threat of AI dominating the headlines. There is insurmountable prognostication from pundits on all sides of observation — thinkers, doers, computer scientists, investors, executives, academics, journalists, policy-makers, and just regular folks — about where AI will lead, with or without direct human control.
As always, my core belief is that technology advances faster than our ability to understand its social implications. This is also another one of those situations where it is impossible to say if anyone can paint a clear and true picture of what we’ll see on the road ahead, be it five, ten, or a hundred years from today.
This for me has become a Wright Brothers moment. What I mean by that is trying to imagine what the Wright Brothers might have thought about where their first powered flyer might lead in the ensuing hundred years. Although they understood the potential military applications of flight, they couldn’t have imagined the 37-hour round-trip path of the recent B2 intercontinental bombing mission. They couldn’t have imagined commercial flights filling up daily at relatively low cost with endless travelers. They couldn’t have envisioned space travel with or without humans to the moon, Mars, or beyond our own galaxy.
I’m familiar with the Wright Brothers story as it was foundational to the first storytelling project I joined to bring to life in technology, a very early computer game called Wings. That game followed the life of a young pilot in World War I, an extremely rudimentary military use of aeronautics long beyond the imagination of the innovators Wilbur and Orville Wright. The success of the Kitty Hawk biplane experiment in 1903 led to armed aircraft and pilots fighting each other in flight a decade later. That was an early twentieth-century sign of how fast technology would evolve from concept to unplanned implementation.
The more I study AI and approve early-stage projects where it is being applied to our business, the more I am convinced we are in a Wright Brothers moment. Virtually no one reading this blog will be around in a century to either say “I told you so” or gasp at the outcome of where machine learning, large language models, generative AI, or agentic adoption will take us. It would be like the Wright Brothers on that remote North Carolina beach envisioning a frequent flyer program and pre-ordering their inflight meal — or trying to picture an aircraft carrier at sea, or a massive rocket lifting into the air and landing again on its base.
Futurists may try to see through a crystal ball, but we all know that’s mostly a fool’s errand. What we may think the history of science will bring and what it actually delivers are almost impossible to reconcile within a lifetime, let alone beyond a lifetime.
I felt similarly when I bought my first personal computer in the mid-1980s at the beginning of my career, mostly to use as a word processor. That was a few years before a small team of collaborators built that WWI game called Wings. In those few years following the first monochrome monitor on my desktop, we created a brightly colored rendering of a three-dimensional flight simulator at extraordinarily low cost and sold at a similarly attractive consumer price point. I thought to myself, where will this exponential compounding take us in the tangible decades ahead of me?
The quantitative advances in processing instructions were already staggering. We had just bought new computers with 20mb hard drives and the Holy Grail of local storage appeared to be CD-ROM. That was before the commercial internet, before broadband, before widely available cellphones, and long before any kind of advanced mobile device in your hand that could access and display unlimited high-definition video. No one could have pictured an iPhone, not even Steve Jobs.
All of that pales in comparison to what I think AI will bring. I’m trying to envision the world in a decade, in two decades, which hopefully I will see. A hundred years from now, what will be the human experience? What is the equivalent of boarding a plane with 400 other passengers for a flight of several hours across an ocean and hoping to get upgraded versus waiting in line at a port hoping to find passage on a steamship for a week or two of unsteady seas?
Together we are sharing a Wright Brothers moment. We’re on a windy shoreline, staring in awe at an ingeniously designed, materially fragile, heavier-than-air, modestly motor-powered, fancy bit of kite architecture, equipped to carry a single passenger off the ground for about 12 seconds.
What this means is that we are about to fly.
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Photo: Pixabay
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