Lightbulbs to TVs

What would it mean for AI to grow at a rate similar to that of the light bulb? In short, we don’t know.

Some of electricity’s early use cases were quite obvious. We can create light everywhere and replace candles. We no longer need to worry about bulbs, wicks, and oil to create additional lights. Then one can imagine a medium-order effect. What if an entire building had simple electric-based lighting? What if a whole city powered electricity to lights in every home? One can even envision Times Square as an incredible growth from the simple lightbulb becoming an entire ecosystem of smaller light bulbs.

But there are other things that are simply not possible to predict. One could never imagine so many lightbulbs packed together so tightly and operating so precisely to produce dynamic images like we see commonplace on 4K LED TVs today. One could never imagine gates opening and closing shrinking so small to be a fraction of the size of a single hair, producing what we today call a microprocessor.

In the same way, it is easy today to see certain tasks humans do being replaced by machines. If someone has a job that involves taking PDFs they receive and inputting that information into a database via a CRM, it is not hard to imagine this can be done fairly trivially with AI now or soon. But what would happen if we saw a curve in AI that grows as rapidly and as exponentially as we see with a lightbulb to a TV?