Lead then Democratize

Generated by author using Midjourney

I love the quote attributed to Neuromancer’s author William Gibson, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” It reminds me of the one of the six D’s of innovation from Peter Diamandis’ book Bold. Those being Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Demonetized, Dematerialized, and then… Democratized.

When something is so cheap to use, it can be accessible. When tools are creative to make the technology accessible, more people can use it.

AI image generation is undergoing this now. First, there were the closed betas by OpenAI. Then, there were Github repos. Now, there are tools that tap into GPT-3. Websites like Craiyon.com make it extremely easy for novices to start playing with the technology. Just add text in a text box and press Enter. Done.

Self-driving vehicles are heading this direction as well. While full self-driving has been demonstrated for well over a decade, it was prohibitively expensive. The Moores’ Law-based reduction in cost of components meant that cameras and LIDAR were cheap enough to be used in production vehicles. Now, technologies being brought to market first by Tesla are being offered in other vehicles. It won’t be long before all new vehicles on the market have full self-driving.

Expect any new innovation to quickly disseminate — at a faster rate than we’ve experienced before.