# Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later

[Kevin Kelly](https://kk.org)'s
[_The Inevitable_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_%28book%29)
articulates a handful of macro technological trends and follows them to their
logical conclusions. It's an insightful read -- I highly recommend it.

One decade later, here are some AI-related excerpts from the book:

- ["By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI."](#1)
- ["oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences"](#2)
- ["The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services"](#3)
- ["The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains"](#4)
- ["in conversational tones, any question at all"](#5)

## "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." {1}

> Around 2002 I attended a private party for Google—before its IPO, when it was
> a small company focused only on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry
> Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so
> many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?” My
> unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially
> about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its
> ad auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other
> major acquisitions. I was not the only avid user of its search site who
> thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me:
> “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
>
> I’ve thought a lot about that conversation over the past few years as Google
> has bought 13 other AI and robotics companies in addition to DeepMind. At
> first glance, you might think that Google is beefing up its AI portfolio to
> improve its search capabilities, since search constitutes 80 percent of its
> revenue. But I think that’s backward. Rather than use AI to make its search
> better, Google is using search to make its AI better. Every time you type a
> query, click on a search-generated link, or create a link on the web, you are
> training the Google AI. When you type “Easter Bunny” into the image search bar
> and then click on the most Easter Bunny–looking image, you are teaching the AI
> what an Easter Bunny looks like. Each of the 3 billion queries that Google
> conducts each day tutors the deep-learning AI over and over again. With
> another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a
> thousandfold more data and a hundred times more computing resources, Google
> will have an unrivaled AI. In a quarterly earnings conference call in the fall
> of 2015, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that AI was going to be “a core
> transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing. . . .
> We are applying it across all our products, be it search, be it YouTube and
> Play, etc.” My prediction: By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search
> but AI.

In 2017, Google researchers published
[_Attention Is All You Need_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need),
which introduced a deep-learning architecture called the _transformer_.

## "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" {2}

> As it does, this cloud-based AI will become an increasingly ingrained part of
> our everyday life. But it will come at a price. Cloud computing empowers the
> law of increasing returns, sometimes called the network effect, which holds
> that the value of a network increases much faster as it grows bigger. The
> bigger the network, the more attractive it is to new users, which makes it
> even bigger and thus more attractive, and so on. A cloud that serves AI will
> obey the same law. The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The
> smarter it gets, the more people who use it. The more people who use it, the
> smarter it gets. And so on. Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it
> tends to grow so big so fast that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a
> result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three
> large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.

Kelly predicted AI heavyweights while advocating for a future of open weights:

> Ideally, this additional intelligence should be not just cheap, but free. A
> free AI, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science
> like no other force we can imagine and would pay for itself in no time.

## "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" {3}

> Amid all this activity, a picture of our AI future is coming into view, and it
> is not the HAL 9000—a discrete machine animated by a charismatic (yet
> potentially homicidal) humanlike consciousness—or a Singularitan rapture of
> superintelligence. The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web
> Services—cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind
> everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off. This common
> utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need.
> You’ll simply plug into the grid and get AI as if it was electricity.

## "The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains" {4}

Not even Kelly foresaw
[the bitter lesson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson):

> Yet most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by nonhuman-like
> programs. The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains that can, for
> example, translate any language into any other language, but do little else.
> Drive a car, but not converse. Or recall every pixel of every video on
> YouTube, but not anticipate your work routines. In the next 10 years, 99
> percent of the artificial intelligence that you will interact with, directly
> or indirectly, will be nerdly narrow, supersmart specialists.

## "in conversational tones, any question at all" {5}

> Very soon now we’ll live in a world where we can ask the cloud, in
> conversational tones, any question at all. And if that question has a known
> answer, the machine will explain it to us. Who won the Rookie of the Year
> Award in 1974? Why is the sky blue? Will the universe keep expanding forever?
> Over time the cloud, or Cloud, the machine, or AI, will learn to articulate
> what is known and not known. At first it may need to engage us in a dialog to
> clarify ambiguities (as we humans do when answering questions), but, unlike
> us, the answer machine will not hesitate to provide deep, obscure, complex
> factual knowledge on any subject—if it exists.
>
> ...
>
> As we cognify more books and movies and the internet of things, answers become
> ubiquitous. We are headed to a future where we will ask several hundred
> questions per day. Most of these questions will concern us and our friends.
> “Where is Jenny? What time is the next bus? Is this kind of snack good?” The
> “manufacturing costs” of each answer will be nanocents. Search, as in “give me
> an answer,” will no longer be considered a first-world luxury. It will become
> an essential universal commodity.