Let's just assume for the sake of argument advances in AI continue to stack up.

Then at some point, AI will become our default computing platform.

The way of interacting with digital information. Our main interface with the world.

Does this change everything about our lives? Or nothing at all?

As a machine learning engineer, I've seen "AI" mean different things to different people.

Recent investments in LLMs (Large Language Models) and adjacent technologies are bringing all kinds of conversational interfaces to software products.

Is this conversational interface "an AI" (whatever that means)?

Or does "an AI" need to be agentic to transform the way the economy works? To change our human OS? To complete the "AI revolution"?

Either way, I couldn't help but notice that a lot of the hype around AI is about AI applications–not about AI as a computing platform.*

So I wanted to see where the AI hype would lead us when taken at face value

And given that my AI and genAI-powered searches didn't yield meaningful results, I decided to come up with some conjectures of my own.

I've decided to align these conjectures with the sun, the moon, and the holy quadrity of A.I.

The holy quadrity of AI, in no particular order

So let's see what happens if we do decide to hand over the keys to "an / the AI".

The mirage of internet data

For (the human-developed and adopted technology of) AI to deliver broad-strokes, sweeping societal changes it needs data to control our world.

And in terms of volume, most of the available data we have is internet data.

Of an estimated 120 zettabytes of internet data generated by us humans in 2023, more than half was video (data source: explodingtopics.com). For scale, the Large Hadron Collider, one of the largest scientific experiments ever set up by humans, generates around 15 petabytes of data a year. 15 petabytes is roughly ~1e-7 of 120 zettabytes (data source: lhc-closer.es)

As can be seen in the diagram above, the vast majority of that internet data is video. Which, let's be honest, is mostly generated for entertainment purposes.

Let's oversimplify things a bit and classify this treasure trove of data:

Leisure: non-work digital human activity (blue+purple tones in the diagram).
Business: data generated for commercial purposes (grey+purple tones).
Public: governments, science, NGOs and other data (too small / NA).

We can maybe generously claim that legitimate business us...

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