Automated Everything: ‘Industry X.Y’ Will Drive Progress (and Risk) Faster Than AI

The world is abuzz with news, speculation, and a healthy dose of fear around artificial intelligence, or AI. Long considered science fiction, AI has arrived in the form of real-world, valuable applications with advances coming faster than ever.

Although there are legitimate concerns about its boundaries, right now AI is mainly disrupting the knowledge economy, i.e., the people who work with words, images, and numbers. Generative AI moves beyond simple rule-based measures that replace routine operations (which people find boring and mind-numbing) and uses patterns and structures in data to generate “newish” content and rules. It is now able to quickly produce essays, speeches, and photorealistic fakes.