[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please don’t gatekeep me lol.]
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.
Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
When someone comes up with something like this, I transport the phrase back to the 80s where people said the exact same thing about home computers. “if a computer was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved (in) your face by every product. People would just use it.” Ok great but a computer turned out to be something everyone wanted or needed which is why computers were built into everything by the turn of the 90s, famously leading to the Y2k bug.
Then I transport the phrase back to the mid 90s where people said the exact same thing about the internet. By the end of the 90s, the internet provided the backbone communications structures for telecommunications, emergency management, banking, education, and was built into every possible product. Ten years later people got smartphones and literally couldn’t put them down.
People did just use it. But because they were so comically expensive and complicated, most people couldn’t afford one until the mid-90s.
Computers were rapidly adopted for business, initially. But they quickly became a popular tool for entertainment as well.
AI serves little in the way of either purpose
Yeah, some of the things AI can do really is very impressive. Whether that justifies the billions upon billions that are being spent is another matter - and probably explains why it’s being shoved in our faces. It needs to become essential so it can be made expensive, that’s the only way it’ll make the money back.
It does piss me off too - I recently bought a new phone and it’s infested with AI stuff I don’t need or want.
At the time computers were totally useless for everyone but big firms, banks and military. Ads for computers were rare and confined in specialized magazines. For mundane people, computers started to be actually useful (like money earning useful) 20 years latter at least. That’s how I understand your approximative comparison
Honestly I think we’re in the radium water phase of the tech: it’s been found to do things we couldn’t before, but nobody’s got a clear idea of what exactly what it can do, so you’ve got everyone throwing it into everything hoping for a big cash-out. Like, y’know, Radithor when people were just figuring out radioactivity was a thing.
I was there in the 80s and I don’t remember home computers being pushed all that hard. There were Radio Shack ads and ads for running games, but it was just another appliance.