The AI 'bucket list', guest blog by Steven Drost, chief strategy officer at CodeBase and professor at the University of Edinburgh
/AI is the latest technology paradigm to impact society at a large scale, and there is a lot of conversation around what AI is, what it is not, what it can do, can’t do, what it means for society, jobs, productivity, and more. At the same time, the conversation around AI can be confusing.
I often talk about AI as being in one of three “buckets” - bucket one being “the unknown”, bucket two “the familiar”, and bucket three “the commodity”.
Bucket one (“the unknown”) is AI that is going to create brand new life realities, create new unfathomable paradigms that we cannot really articulate. This kind of AI conversation will often invoke sci-fi descriptions, both on the dystopian side, think AI doomsayers’ visions of Skynet-powered robot overlords primed to kill us in the movie Terminator.
Or, we invoke utopian thoughts of robots doing all the work, helping humans to live their best lives, unencumbered by the need for labour. This level of AI innovation is not just about the current breakthroughs such as large language models, but anticipates deep, sweeping, disruptive phenomena that would see AI building AI - artificial general Intelligence (AGI) - and completely change life as we know it.
Bucket two (“the familiar”) is AI that’s already here. It presents itself to you in the shape of new features in your productivity tools you have been using on your computer or smartphone. To give an example, you can now record a Microsoft Teams call, have an AI feature transcribe the conversation into text, have that text translated and then push the translation out as a podcast with an AI-enabled voice.
This AI is not really disruptive, but rather it sustains existing work and life flows by supercharging them. It’s the basis of the promise that efficiency gains can be made, that we can make our economy more productive. In this version of AI, AI will act as an agent, a co-pilot for existing jobs. Yes, some low level jobs will disappear, but others will be retained, and new ones will appear. So, hospital waiting lists will go down through better bed allocation.
Bucket three (“the commodity”) contains developments around AI that are moving so fast that they are almost invisible. To illustrate, consider the iPhone: the changes between iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 were huge: and were obvious to even the most casual user. But the change delta from iPhone 15 to iPhone 16 is much harder to see and experience.
AI is going through that process much faster. This means that AI will become a commodity very quickly, inserted into many human endeavours, in the way that electricity is omnipresent. We will be able to buy ‘intelligence’ cheaply via new vehicles and methods, and this will have a huge impact on how we work, live, and interact with the world around us.
The first bucket will be created by the brightest people at the best universities. The second bucket already belongs to big tech companies, and the third bucket belongs to new ventures, including startups that can be built by non-technical people.
At CodeBase, we are at the intersection of this paradigm as an AI enabler in the Scottish technology ecosystem.