Video Script (Video Length: 6:14)
This is the fourth video in a series that, in its entirety, provides a brief primer on Collaborative Intelligence for business executives and other business leaders.
Since CI is still in its early stages, you may be asking, “Is this really a priority?” This video will provide an answer.
But before I answer, I need to share an apocryphal story about a mathematician who invented the game of chess and the emperor who loved the new game. Although the story, in various forms and in various locales, has been around for centuries, it was popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns.
The emperor asked the mathematician what reward he would like for his invention. The mathematician replied that he would place one grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, the next day, he would place two grains on the second square, then four on the third square, continuing to double the number of grains each day until all sixty-four squares of the board were covered. The total number of grains on the board would constitute his reward.
The emperor thought this was a humble reward and agreed.
Things were fine, at first, but as things progressed, the emperor began to get concerned. It took four billion grains of rice to cover the first half of the chessboard, which is the amount produced by one large rice field in a year.
But after the transition to the second half of the chessboard, the growth in rice grains accelerated so quickly that it threatened to bankrupt the emperor, who promptly killed the mathematician for tricking him.
What would have happened if things had continued?
The global production of rice in 2022 was estimated at 510M metric tons, and there are more than 15M grains of rice in each metric ton. That’s more than 7.8 quadrillion grains of rice. But it’s not even close to being enough. Covering the entire chess board would require more than 2,300 times more grains of rice than were produced in 2022.
The point of this story is that, when things growing at exponential rates reach what Kurzweil termed the second half of the chessboard, it is hard for people to grasp how quickly things will change or imagine what might be possible.
As Kurzweil wrote, “technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view.”
ChatGPT is an example of Generative AI, and Generative AI is one of the many technology categories that enable Collaborative Intelligence. Generative AI has been around for many years, but no one noticed until the sizes and the capabilities of the language models that underpin this technology reached the second half of the chessboard.
According to a study published by UBS, ChatGPT reached 100 million unique active users in two months. By comparison, it took TikTok nine months and Snapchat almost four years to reach the same level of adoption. ChatGPT is certainly an example of a technology exploding into view.
The exponential growth of Generative AI capabilities is driven, in part, by exponential growth in two foundational technologies: computing power and data, but many other CI technologies exhibit exponential growth, too.
In 1975, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, predicted that the computing power of an integrated circuit would double every two years, implying that it would exhibit exponential growth. By 1985, with the release of the Cray-2 supercomputer, Moore’s prediction was validated, which is why it came to be known as Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law still holds today, which is why our phones and gaming consoles have more computing power than the supercomputers from previous eras.
While attempting to validate this law, Ray Kurzweil discovered an important characteristic, not just for computing power, but for many technologies: the rate of exponential growth is, itself, growing exponentially.
If I expand the computing power timeline from 1985 to 2023, you see that the rate of exponential growth is, indeed, increasing exponentially. You may think the rate is the same, but as you can read in the charts’ subtitles, I had to change the values on the Y-axis from units of one million to units of one quadrillion to make each of the displayed axis values the same magnitude.
The growth of computing power has reached the 2nd half of the chessboard. It is now accelerating so quickly that its growth over the past three years has exceeded the growth from the previous 50 years.
While I won’t show any more charts, the growth in the amount of data available in the world was doubling every four years, then it was doubling every two years. Today, it is estimated to be doubling every 18 months. The expected growth of Internet of Things applications, which generate a lot of data, and concerted efforts at synthetic data generation, has led to predictions that the amount of data will soon be doubling every year.
Rapidly accelerating growth in computing power and data is driving exponential growth in secondary technologies, such as AI, machine learning, computational intelligence, computer vision, and machine autonomy.
All these technologies, and more, enable Collaborative Intelligence, whose capabilities, as you would suspect, are also growing exponentially.
The point is that Collaborative Intelligence is accelerating so quickly that your organization cannot afford to get left behind. It won’t be able to catch up to the early adopters, who are already using CI to improve their organization’s performance, as the second video in this series demonstrated.
Returning to the original question, my answer is Yes, CI should be a priority in your organization. You shouldn’t launch a CI-driven transformation across your entire organization just yet, but you should get started on some CI projects right away.
How to get started will be the topic of the next video.
Thank you for watching.
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