Imagine Amazon twenty years ago. Then look at Amazon today. Now remove the warehouses, trucks, concrete, inventory, and the twenty-year wait.
Read more Canada approved woman for MAID euthanasia because she could no longer make Sunday dinners
That is the easiest way to see what super-intelligence can attempt.
In 2006, Amazon was already formidable and still recognizable as a retailer: 59 million active customer accounts, 35 product categories, more than a million seller accounts, and 10.2 million square feet of fulfillment space. That same year, it launched the services that became Amazon Web Services. Twenty years later, it is no longer a store. It is marketplace, warehouse, delivery network, computing infrastructure, and advertising platform, and part of the machinery through which retail now operates.
Amazon did not merely compete with the marketplace. It became part of how the marketplace runs.
On September 29, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Executive Branch to use the term “super intelligence” and “SI” instead of “artificial intelligence” and “AI” in official communications and other non-statutory documents. For now, the order uses the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence while directing development of a new federal definition. The important question is whether the speed of economic transformation is about to change with the name.
Amazon needed twenty years because it had to move atoms. Every new warehouse meant land, concrete, shelves, workers, trucks, and roads. Expansion ultimately ran into geography.
SI moves information, and information does not need a truck. Once a useful system exists, another copy does not require another factory. Ten thousand accountants assisted by SI do not require ten thousand new machines manufactured and shipped to ten thousand offices. The capability can travel as software onto computers already sitting on desks.
That collapses time. Amazon’s conquest of retail is the wrong timetable and the right model. What Amazon did to retail in twenty years, SI could attempt to do to knowledge work in two.
The progression is already visible. SI answers questions, drafts documents, analyzes spreadsheets, and conducts research. Increasingly, it can move beyond answering into doing: scheduling, monitoring projects, contacting suppliers, comparing bids, preparing contracts, and following transactions. At some point the question stops being what SI can do and becomes what still happens without it.
That “Amazon moment” can arrive much faster because knowledge work already owns much of the infrastructure retail had to build. The computers are on the desks, offices are networked, and documents and databases are already digital.
Read more Stupidity: Is It The New Political Power?
Focusing only on whether SI will “replace jobs” misses the larger reorganization. Amazon did not simply replace bookstores. It rearranged the relationship among buyer, seller, warehouse, advertiser, shipper, and computing infrastructure. SI can do something similar among worker, manager, specialist, customer, and institution.
Lawyers, physicians, engineers, and accountants are not necessarily going away. But a professional who once needed five people to gather information, prepare documents, perform routine analysis, and coordinate the work may increasingly direct a set of agents. That changes employment, but it also changes the shape of the firm. There may simply be less organization needed between the person making the decision and the work being done.
Amazon’s advantage was never only cheaper books. It steadily removed friction between wanting something and having it arrive at the door. SI is beginning to remove the same kind of friction from knowledge work.
The physical world remains physical. Houses still have to be built, crops grown, pipes repaired, patients examined, and electricity generated. Atoms keep their speed limit. Knowledge increasingly does not.
That split is the economic fact worth watching. The physical economy can keep moving at roughly human speed while the informational economy begins moving at machine speed.
A contractor may still need six months to build a house. But financing it, designing it, pricing materials, checking codes, scheduling subcontractors, preparing permits, ordering components, and monitoring the job can increasingly run through SI.
Amazon had to construct the infrastructure of its revolution while conducting the revolution. SI arrives after much of that infrastructure is already in place. Billions of people already carry networked computers. Businesses already operate digitally. Commerce moves electronically, and cloud computing operates at planetary scale. The same day as the naming order, the administration directed America.gov as a single digital front door for federal information and services, and required the SI used there to be accurate, reliable, and transparent.
Twenty years ago, calling Amazon “a very successful online store” was accurate — and hopelessly inadequate. “A very useful chatbot” may turn out to be the same kind of sentence.
Read more When Kyiv’s Drones Hit the American Ballot
Image: ajay_suresh via Flickr (cropped), CC BY 2.0.