Letters | Why AI isn’t changing our world yet (give it 10 more years)

Readers discuss how long it takes for innovation to result in revolutionary, why the waste-charging scheme must anticipate how people will respond, and the need to prioritise recycling

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Social media apps on a phone. The internet as we know it took time to grow and mature. This may be pertinent to the current fervour for artificial intelligence. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 11:30am, 27 Jan 2024

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Over the past decades, technological innovation has consistently made headlines. Yet, a pattern emerges: new concepts are often met with stratospheric expectations, when their limitations should be more thoroughly assessed.

The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s epitomises this trend. Companies could attract investment by adding prefixes like “e-” and “i-” or the suffix “.com”, even with scant connection to actual technological advancement. Back then, there were long queues in Hong Kong, with nearly a million application forms – one for every seven people in the city – snapped up in a scramble for Tom.com’s initial public offering of shares. Yet, how many among the masses truly understood the company’s business model and the risks involved?

After the dotcom bubble burst, start-ups – those with a valuation of US$1 billion are called “unicorns” – continue to attract investors. Occasionally, they attract ill-considered investment from seasoned investors. See, for example, the failure of WeWork and the scandal surrounding Theranos.

Not every innovation will succeed and it may require a considerable span of time for a genuine breakthrough to result in revolutionary change. Consider how the internet emerged in the 1970s but only became widely used in the 1990s, with the launch of the World Wide Web. Even then, it wasn’t until the 2000s that platforms such as Facebook and YouTube appeared.

In other words, tech ecosystems have to grow and mature before they can make a profound and widespread impact.