Coming off of an amazing panel on AI and payments, co-hosted with our good friends and colleagues at Holland & Knight, I wanted to share an observation I mentioned that many may disagree with, but from my perspective, rings very true. It’s a comment on the well known futurist, Roy Amara’s, law, a.k.a. “Amara’s Law.”
Roy Amara specialized in technology forecasting and the social implications of technological change. He was a US Navy technician during WW2, and had degrees from Harvard, MIT, and a Ph.D in Systems Engineering from Stanford.
The eponymous law captures what heretofore has been considered a truth about how we, society, perceive new, groundbreaking technologies. It is also widely accepted to have informed the better known Gartner Hype Cycle which is more of an illustrative tool to help visualize the same, but with a focus on business and investment and when to allocate funds to a new technology.
In essence, Amara’s Law says this:
“We [society] tend to overestimate the effects and potential of a technology in the short term and underestimate the same in the long term”
It’s my contention, however, that Amara’s Law, this foundational way of thinking about new technology, as it pertains to AI, is not valid.
I believe we’ve underestimated AI’s capabilities in the short term. That we’re already transitioning from the seemingly magical capabilities of generative AI to agentic so quickly, to my mind, is amazing – ChatGPT was released less than 3-years ago.
As to the long term, along with the steadily increasing drum beat of quantum computing, and the ability to solve problems requiring exponential time, there’s no logical basis for me to credibly believe it’s possible to underestimate AI’s future potential.
It ought not be lost on any of us that this is the first technology created by humans that has the ability to advance itself.
Image from SFGate
