Artificial Intelligence: The Least Disruptive Discontinuous Innovation

Three years after ChatGPT’s sudden prevalence, the age of AI disillusionment shows no signs of stopping. Not only has Tyler Perry yet to release any AI generated movie or television show, but advanced AI in general receives little consciously acknowledged impact from the average person on their day to day. Cancer still exists and the quality of healthcare people are able to receive continues to vary dramatically within an individual community, let alone around the globe. Problems like homelessness and world hunger remain outside our ability to overcome.

So, what has this most recent wave of AI done so far? There was a publicly panned Coca-Cola advertisement, an increase in social media spam, and a button was added to Gmail that can help you draft emails that you probably click on accident more than intentionally. That’s not to say nothing has changed, but the burning question I ask is, “Why should Jill and Joe Shmoe care about the AI label on every product they own?”

Modern AI

Artificial intelligence, in the broadest sense, has been around for a long while. Even before YouTube and Facebook were radicalizing its users with their algorithms, credit card companies were using machine learning to more accurately flag possible fraudulent charges. It wasn’t until Generative AI came around, however, that there was an almost global acknowledgement of AI’s existence outside of science fiction. ChatGPT made it seem like Cortana from Halo or Blade Runner’s Replicants were due any day now.

When I take the time to identify where modern AI comes into play in the average person’s daily life, its role does not appear to be mission critical. If the Walmart greeter I passed by yesterday had one of the newest iPhones, she might be using iMessage’s AI generated responses when she texts her kids. Odds are, she has an older phone than the 15 and has a thousand priorities above upgrading to Apple Intelligence. The younger, more tech savvy, generation might be using a chatbot to complete their homework. Outside of school, Gemini isn’t in their Discord voice chat.

Every day, in the B2B space especially, a new AI startup pops up promising a crazy leap in performance that seems too good to be true. There are so many of these companies in fact that the market has naturally produced extreme segmentation so that almost every niche conceivable is being offered some new product tailored to their highly specific needs. Whether you require a copywriter for Amazon listings or need to most efficiently manage your transportation fleet, there’s a specialized AI product available for you. But how advanced are these products and is their promised leap as big as they claim it is?

What Qualifies as a Disruptive Advancement?

A disruptive, or discontinuous, change is an advancement that radically transforms a product or system. This change can essentially create an entirely different product. Think of how the invention of the internet changed what a computer was. Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64. CRTs and HD Flat Screens. Flip Phones and Smartphones. All the products named second are clearly the successor to the former. They were initially shocking, inspired changes within their respective ecosystems, and, most importantly, were obviously distinct from the previous offering.

Because I am looking at these markets from the consumer’s perspective, I am intentionally not acknowledging the technology that goes into making these changes. How much ram is inside the newest Samsung Galaxy has no weight on Billy’s decision for his first phone. What Billy cares about is which one can run Call of Duty Mobile the best. He couldn’t care less about the parts inside the phone or how they came to be there. This is generally true for the majority of consumers past the early adopters.

Some innovations that might be technically significant can be interpreted by the market as an incremental improvement. Take Apple’s 3D touch that was offered for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The new technology allowed for screen navigation to be transformed and opened up exciting new scenarios for interacting with touch screens. When the iPhone 6 hit the market, customers didn’t care too much about the 3D touch. The little utility it added did not justify the cost of the technology and the phone appeared to be just another incremental improvement of the previous iPhone. 3D touch wasn’t the selling feature that Apple thought it would be. The same argument can be made for the new Apple Intelligence iPhones where there is obvious innovation, but the value added is not creating an entirely new product category. (Despite what marketing would lead you to believe.)

This toeing of the line of discontinuity is what most AI companies are doing today. Technically superior products that can easily be perceived as an expected incremental upgrade.

Did I mention it has AI though?

Every product and my grandma now has AI tacked onto it as if that is an automatic indicator of quality and while I love my grandma’s tamales, AI wasn’t the one thing she was missing to reach perfection. My grandma with AI is, fundamentally, still my grandma. I do not place value in the fact that she has AI, because that fact itself is irrelevant when measuring quality. The same metrics can be used to measure performance for most things whether or not they have AI, as long as they are comparable to the previous offering, which most new AI products are. There are few places where modern AI improvements have created distinct new products.

Companies can plaster those two letters on every product they release, but if the end user does not see the distinction between it and the established market, then the innovation is meaningless. How means nothing when the majority of people look at the application and results and its relation to the cost.

Looking back to the aforementioned discontinuous innovations, there is a clear major change in the product offering and an impact on society as a whole. Imagine the world today without smartphones. Now imagine the world today without the last four years of advancements in AI. The former sounds like a form of torture; the latter would be hardly different from today. Why is AI touted as this major disruption that seems to occupy a disproportionate amount of broadband for the consciously acknowledged impact it has had on the average person?

There is no doubt that advancements are made every day in the AI space. ChatGPT gets better at responding and most image generators can almost produce pictures of human hands that don’t look like spaghetti. Nonetheless, these improvements are almost imperceptible.

A List of (Some of) my Questions

If modern AI is the behemoth everyone is making it out to be, why is there no clear value for the general consumer that is making them excited about this innovation? Why does the gap in performance from previous technologies seem so small for such a supposedly disruptive change?

Is big tech trying to create an AI heuristic where decision makers focus solely on technology rather than real performance? Most of these up and comers don’t have a track record to back their enticing promised returns. If all these returns of investment claims made by AI companies are true, the global GDP is going to 10x over the next two years somehow.

Is this a naïve Gen-Z take from someone who has surrounded themselves with technology for so long that they don’t understand how long change takes? Obviously, other disruptive innovations, including the ones I mentioned in this article, took longer than three years to change the world. In a year, we might be living in this AI utopia everyone says is right around the corner and, oh boy, will my face be red. Or maybe that isn’t the case, and we’re already behind major societal changes from technological advancements for the time being. We’ve caught up to a lot of science fiction in the past 80 years and things might just be finally settling.

Are we spending too much time focusing on AI? When this technology plateaus and our problems are still here, what magic solution are we going to hope for next? I know this technology really seems like the one, but how many of our relationships started off feeling like that only to turn out to not be the case? Its current space in conversation does not appear to be in line with real world performance and application.

Finally, and most importantly, does anyone else think that Tyler Perry used SORA as a scapegoat for putting his studio expansion on hold? Maybe his accountant advised him that there wasn’t the market he thought there was for another dozen Madea movies. He made a pretty major call literally the minute SORA was announced. Seems a little too convenient for me…

It surprises me when I get an idea to write about and end up on my fourth page in Word before I realize it. I can write so quickly sometimes that I worry my idea might not be as developed as it could be. On occasion, I’ll run my writing through an AI chatbot to see if my thoughts came through like I wanted them to and get some feedback without bothering one of the few friends I have that will review my work honestly. When I ran the above through Gemma3:27b on Ollama, I was pleasantly surprised for it to call me out on my weaknesses and potential bias when I asked it to assess the validity of the article.

Addressing some of the critiques:

I am indeed subjective like every other human. I had a narrative that I was trying to make and fixated on details to support my argument and didn’t acknowledge some important advancements that were fueled by AI. In the medical field especially, AI is doing incredible things. I will be doing flips when there’s a cure for diabetes or Alzheimer’s that was a result of AI innovation. It’s just that there isn’t an AI solution for my actual day-to-day problems that could only be solved by a paradigm shifting technology yet. What technology will get people to stop stealing my dryer sheets whenever I turn my back at the laundromat? (Yes, this has happened multiple times.) Also, medical advances are to be expected. The digital age has conditioned society to expect constant improvement, and AI seems more like the status quo than the future.

The next three critiques feed into the first. I do want to acknowledge my cynical tone and tech skepticism. I’ll admit that even I will reread some of my writing and find that it sounds like it was written by some miserable person in a damp basement next to their collection of Pop figurines. I want to believe that some of the reason behind that is that my sarcasm doesn’t come through perfectly in text. Believe it or not, but I don’t write these pieces in a huff, furiously typing on my keyboard with an ugly scowl across my face. Furthermore, as much as I love technology and am excited for what’s to come, I am a pragmatist. I have led, been a part of, and witnessed failure in my life. I have never seen a mistake that was never repeated and am confident that AI’s creation and implementation will be just as deeply flawed as the current tech ecosystem. I wish it to be as good as it can be, and unbridled optimism isn’t going to do that.

Gemma called me reasonably valid so, evidently, AI has a much longer way to go than even I thought. Anything that thinks I’m somewhat reasonable is obviously out of its gourd.