The Unseen Revoltion
Midjourney v7 Five Unseen AI Revolutions
Five areas AI will change that nobody expects
As technologies go, it is hard to find another technology that has achieved such an impact in such a short period of time. Today, 5.5 billion people use the internet, but its adoption took decades. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and by 1999, there were 160 million users, half of whom were in the US, a long way from the 69% of the global population that uses the internet today. Other technologies like television, the automobile, or the steam engine took decades to change our societies.
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping industries in months. Many cases have been predictable, like healthcare diagnostics, financial forecasting, and autonomous vehicles. Yet subtler and more potent changes are taking place that few are noticing or discussing.
Understanding five of these unexpected transformations will help us all debate whether we want those changes to continue.
The Death of Objective News
Imagine news channels and newspapers with just one reader. Would you read it?
We've already witnessed the polarisation of new media, but AI is accelerating this trend exponentially. Soon, news won't simply be curated for you; it will be generated specifically for you. AI systems are already crafting customised news feeds that reflect and reinforce your existing perspectives and biases.
The boundary between news as information and news as entertainment will blur completely. Personal AI news will optimise every headline, every story angle, and every choice of phrasing to keep you engaged rather than informed. At a simple level, news about your favourite sports team will reinforce your support of that team, writing stories that support your view of your team. Then extend this to every news topic, for politics, religion, international affairs, fashion, and entertainment. You will have a newscast for every topic, curated and created for an audience of one. You.
The shared reality that traditional journalism once helped maintain is already under threat. Against a new onslaught of highly automated, highly personalised, and highly engaging news articles and videos, traditional journalism will become a relic of the past, along with any last remnants of truth as a shared concept. Will collective truth be mourned?
The Artificial Social Sphere
Everyone can have 2 million followers on their social media. How do you feel about it?
Social media platforms are already experimenting with AI-generated content, but this is only the beginning. Soon, your social media will include entities that don't exist in the real world, involving AI-generated personalities with fabricated lives, opinions, and content tailored specifically to maintain your attention.
You've already seen news stories about AI influencers selling real fashion items. The Artificial Social Sphere is something more. Imagine people commenting on your posts, offering positive affirmations of your ideas, engaging in regular conversations around topics of interest, and a community of AI-generated voices reinforcing your online activity. All AI voices, all seeking to increase your engagement on the platform.
Of course, some traditionalists may insist that only real people matter on social media. How quaint. We have already seen social media users employ bot-farms to create more followers and thus increase potential advertising revenue, and social media influencers trading followers by calling out other influencers on their feeds. AI-generated followers will provide a level of feedback and reinforcement that many people currently can only dream of achieving, and social media is fuelled by building up people's dreams.
The line between human and AI social media interaction is becoming indistinguishable. Your most engaging online relationships might be with entities that exist solely as patterns in a neural network. Will anyone be able to tell?
Hyper Personalised Advertising
You didn't know that this product existed, yet now your life seems empty without it. Did AI just sell you something?
The internet allowed advertisers to rethink product placement, putting adverts into your inbox and alongside your webpages. It was the change that fueled Google, linking internet users with advertisers through microtransactions that initially had a small cost. That is about to change again.
Rather than selecting from pre-existing advertisements and placing them against an individual matching a certain demographic, AI will create hyper-personalised advertising.
Consider a custom advert created in real-time. By the time you have watched 60 seconds of a video or read a few paragraphs, your personalised advert is ready to be viewed. AI will select everything from product selection to messaging, all tailored to your personal profile, your demographics, your current emotional state, recent activities, and even the weather outside your window.
Hyper-personalised advertising will be more than a selection of clothes on display. It will feature items that suit your wardrobe, complementing your other purchases, shown in images that match your favourite venues, with people who look like your friends, reinforcing what a good fit this item would be in your life.
Adverts will visually alter products to appeal to your specific aesthetic preferences. They will then send those changes to the factory that is churning out highly personalised fast fashion made just for you.
The standardised advertising campaign will become obsolete, replaced by millions of uniquely targeted fast campaigns running simultaneously. We may miss the shared recollection of classic adverts, but we may miss our freedom of choice even more.
Predictive Search Engines
These are the droids you are looking for. Have you not noticed?
Search engines will evolve from tools that respond to queries into systems that anticipate your informational needs before you express them. Your digital environment will be continuously pre-loaded with information you haven't yet requested but might soon need.
Search has already migrated from a web browser search bar and into a large language model prompt bar. You will soon open up an AI model before you open a browser, convinced that it provides better answers without the additional faff or time wasting. The concept of "searching" will gradually disappear as information delivery becomes a seamless, predictive process. This shift will fundamentally alter how we interact with information and how we think about knowledge acquisition.
Predictive search engines will begin to unravel the internet as we know it. Advertising or subscription funds most internet pages. Browsers generate revenue by being paid to place certain pages higher in your search results list, hoping to attract more clicks and, consequently, more advertising clicks or subscriptions. The model is simple to get you from search term to answer as quickly as possible.
Social media changed this by enticing you to stay on their site rather than head to another for an answer. Personalised Predictive Search will change both the browser and social media models.
By providing predictive search with answers that people trust, users will remain on the AI page, exploring concepts through the filter of their AI engine. Visits to websites will diminish, removing revenue sources from those sites, and paid-for advertising will have fewer avenues to reach their potential audiences.
The outcome could be placing advertisements on the AI interface pages, and there is plenty of space on all current LLM chat windows where advertising would fit very nicely; however, customers are not yet accustomed to or willing to tolerate placed advertisements. Alternatively, AI models will favour certain products for specific topics, paid by the product owner. This bias is a risk, as users currently enjoy LLMs for being ad and product-placement-free zones. Are they ready to accept product placement even if it diminishes the trust that they have in an answer?
Augmented Reality Perception
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you still own your eyes?
Perhaps most profoundly, AI will begin to mediate our visual perception of reality. Smart glasses and screens will subtly alter what we see by enhancing certain elements, diminishing others, and inserting entirely fabricated components into our visual field.
Companies have attempted similar before with Google Lens, Microsoft HoloLens and the recent Apple Glass. The next generation, soon to be launched, is designed around AI rather than vision first. These devices will embed AI predictive search, hyper-personalised advertising, the death of objective news, and the artificial social sphere into a single wearable device.
Some people will always remain reticent about wearing technology, preferring their devices to be held against their ear or kept at arm's length. Consider the rise of people video calling in public, holding their phone to see the other person while shouting, annoyingly, into the void between their mouth and the phone. This trend indicates that people are increasingly eager to involve others in their immediate experiences through technology. Wearable glasses doing this will make it more intimate and less obtrusive.
Augmented Reality Perception raises questions about privacy and autonomy. When our devices can continuously capture and analyse everything we see, and potentially modify our perception of it, who controls the filters through which we experience reality?
The Unseen Revolution
These changes won't arrive with dramatic announcements or clear demarcation lines. Instead, they'll emerge gradually, each small step appearing reasonable and beneficial in isolation. By the time their full implications become apparent, our social, informational, and perceptual environments may have transformed irreversibly.
When talking to other leaders, a common theme is how they can cope with changing technology. My answer is often to worry less about themselves and instead consider how they will curate a journey for their successors. For current leaders, these changes may be too large and too late in their careers. For the next generation of leaders, these changes will impact every day of their future careers and lives.
Both groups should focus on how to prepare for technological changes that serve our collective interests, not just maximise engagement or control, as the most significant tech revolutions often arrive before we notice them.
