Everything You Should Know About Artificial Intelligence in One Article
Everyone is talking about it. Nearly every company says they’re doing it. More and more professionals claim to be experts in it. But what is AI, how will it transform the global economy, and why are our politicians so keen on regulating it to death, making their countries global leaders in it, or some combination of both? If you've caught yourself using AI as a buzzword without being 100% sure what you're talking about, this primer is for you.
Technology
We often hear the phrases artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) together, but while the former was coined in the 1960s and describes any machine that mimics human intelligence (a pretty low bar), it’s the latter that’s a much bigger deal. ML, and more specifically deep learning, burst onto the scene in 2012, using algorithms (instructions for machines) to identify patterns from large datasets and make predictions – in effect, to learn.
And just as the world wide web has gone through three major phases, so has AI, albeit at an accelerated pace:
- 2012-2022: AIs predict, from the trivial (what song you want to hear next) to the super important (whether your MRI shows the presence of cancer).
- 2022-present: using instructions we give them, AIs generate assets like text, images and videos. Think ChatGPT helping you write that tricky email to an unhappy client.
- 2025-future: AIs take independent action to perform complex tasks, like looking up why your online order wasn’t shipped and correcting it, without any human involvement. This is what people are referring to when they casually drop the latest buzzword, Agentic AI – AI agents working not under but alongside their human counterparts.
Economics & Business
Basic economics teaches us that when price drops, demand spikes, and three brilliant economists have cleverly reframed AI, and past technological revolutions, to explain why it will continue to dominate our world. If the computing revolution (1950s-1970s) entailed a dramatic “drop in the cost of arithmetic,” AI represents a precipitous “drop in the cost of prediction.” Such major price drops not only disrupt the obvious, but can also impact the less obvious, like computers transforming photography from a problem historically solved by chemistry to one solved by arithmetic, in the form of a digital camera.
Obvious examples of cheaper predictions include AIs predicting which email messages are spam, AIs generating summaries of your most recent Zoom call, and AIs acting to solve your latest frustration with Air Canada. A less obvious example of disruption is what may happen when retailers improve their predictions of what you want to buy from 10-20% accuracy to 80-90%. Amazon’s “anticipatory shipping” patent foreshadows a world in which retailers will ship to your door, probably by drone, products that you didn’t buy, for you to either accept or reject. Retail, an industry that has existed for thousands of years, will be fundamentally transformed from an “opt-in” consumer experience to “opt-out.”
Government & Geopolitics
Vladimir Putin has said the country that leads AI will rule the world, Xi Jinping has a state-led plan to surpass the US as AI leader, and Donald Trump is hellbent on maintaining America’s lead. As for Canada, we are academic leaders, commercial laggards, and continue to throw plenty (by Canadian standards, at least) of government money at AI. But at least we’re not Europe, who can’t seem to figure out the right level of regulation. So why are most countries seeking to dominate AI/ML, or at least not fall too far behind? Two main reasons:
- Prosperity and growth: While entry-level, automation-heavy jobs are being replaced by AI, many workers’ productivity will increase, which should translate to real-wage growth and higher living standards. Overall, AI looks to be the miracle technology that policymakers have been searching for to supercharge their low-growth economies, including Canada's.
- Security and military: From autonomous weapons to AI-enabled cyber attacks, Ukraine has been dubbed the “AI war lab.” And the results are impressive: Ukraine’s drone attack in June took out $100 million airplanes with $100 drones, demonstrating how cheap technology can stand up to Goliath.
Superintelligence
In a world with so much hyperbole – recall George Bernard Shaw’s quip that “newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation” – it still feels reasonable to assert that AI is neither overhyped, nor its potential downsides exaggerated. And if you don’t believe me, listen to “Godfather of AI” and recent Nobel Laureate Geoff Hinton explain his cautious prediction that superintelligence – the point at which AIs surpass human intelligence in every cognitive domain – is potentially 10-20 years away.
So what can or should the average person do in the midst of such an unpredictable technological revolution, especially when expert opinion so often diverges (here’s another godfather of AI saying the risks are overstated)? The best most can do is to stay abreast of its evolution, and support leaders who fall into neither extreme: unfettered support while being willfully blind to the risks, or regulatory strangulation, leaving the floor open to nefarious actors.