It took 72 years for the number of US households with a telephone to rise from 10 per cent to 90 per cent. It took 19 years for adoption of the television to follow the same arc. But the speed of take-up for our latest technologies, such as generative AI, is stunning. Within 15 months of launch, 23 per cent of American adults had used OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
The reasons for this acceleration are not hard to fathom. Rather than being a discrete, relatively expensive, physical object, like a telephone or television, generative AI is (mostly) free software that augments existing services.
Colossal global digital platforms can deliver this technology almost instantly at mass scale. This week, Apple announced it would be rolling out “Apple Intelligence” to more than 2bn device users.