This Sunday Story is for anyone curious about how AI - a disruptive element we’ve been talking about for a while now - is going to hit the day to day lives of everyone really soon. Actually, spoiler alert - it already has and you don’t know it - but it’s about to explode in a much bigger way. We’ll be talking about how you use AI every day without realizing it, and how a new release coming from Apple is going to thrust conscious use of AI into the palm of your hand (and the hands of millions of other people) in the next few weeks, and why that matters. Dive in!
Despite the recent press around Chat-GPT and other large language models (a technical term for a computer program that you can “talk” to like a human and get human-like responses) AI has already been embedded in your every day technology for a long time. To get started, let’s define the term - AI is, simply put, a machine that can replicate a human’s intelligence. What we’ve been dealing with for a really long time now is “narrow” AI - you can read more about it in our Briefing Note for Average People, but in essence it’s a computer program that is really good at doing specific tasks that would normally need a human being. In the iPhone example, the Photos app is a great representation of this at work - if you search for “cat”, it will find all the pictures of cats on your camera roll. That’s your phone using a type of AI - a software program that knows what a cat looks like and can search your camera roll for anything that matches that knowledge. You’ve probably been using AI like this for a while without realizing it. There’s a few other examples of this type of AI at work, like your reminders app automatically grouping your grocery list based on where in the store you’ll find items, or your calendar telling you when to leave to get to an appointment on time. The point here is, you’ve been using AI a ton and may not have even realized it.
But the next iteration of iOS is going even further, and this week some details have been shared publicly. This is one of the most significant updates the iPhone has seen in a long time, in terms of software, and it appears to pack in a lot of features. The ones I will highlight here are going to change how you interact with technology, in a potentially really good way, and here are some examples:
The new operating system will provide Chat-GPT-like summaries of articles in the news app. Depending on when you read this article, you might actually be able to read a one-paragraph summary generated by your phone instead of the whole 10-minute post. This means you’ll have a lot more information delivered to your brain, albeit at a more summarized, higher level, so you can discern which topics you want to do a deeper dive into more quickly. In an increasingly disruptive world that’s a handy feature to have, as you’ll be able to be aware and prepared for what’s next without needing to be a full expert on those things much more efficiently.
Notifications will also benefit from AI-powered summaries - when you leave your phone alone for a while, your Home Screen is usually full of all kinds of little banners that tell you who messaged you, when upcoming events are about to start, how many people have SuperLiked you on Tinder or whatever, and any reminders you set amongst other things. The new iOS will provide AI-powered summaries of these notifications, and will likely be able to assess which ones are important and which ones are not. No more hitting the “x” to clear them all after a busy day, risking a miss of an important invite, article, or message from your future love(er) - the AI will catch that for you.
Web Browsing will also feature AI summaries, so you’ll be able to get the gist of a website in an AI-generated paragraph instead of having to poke around and look for yourself.
The reason this matters is that the above three examples are the same feature but deployed in three unique use cases that help you navigate your day, consume information in traditional media, and navigate the information available on the Internet.
This is a significant change in the way we move through digital spaces akin to the advent of the search engine - back in the early days of the internet, you had to type in h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-w-w-w-dot whatever website you were going to, which meant you had to know what website you needed, and if you had a typo or left out a letter, it simply wouldn’t work. Some user improvements happened - like being able to leave out the HTTP part and still get the website loading - and then along came Google (Well, others came first but Google is the one that became a verb) and the way we access information changed forever - instead of being directed to specific addresses, people were told to “google it”, and that’s how we’ve found information online ever since. This is a change that is similar in scope to the popularization of the search engine- it’s baking an AI function in to find, summarize, and sort information in ways we have not seen before, which will change how we make use of the entire internet.
What, then, does the new iOS release have to do with disruption and leadership? In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore wrote about the technological adoption process and mapped it on a curve. He identified that there would be innovators - the folks who helped create the tech, followed by early adopters. These are very small groups. Soon though, if those early adopters sing the praises of the technology, it reaches the stage of Early Majority, where the majority of people start using the tech. That’s followed by Late Majority, who tend to wait until the tech really proves itself, which is then followed by the laggards who only reluctantly pick up the tech. This same curve works for the adoption of ideas and concepts, and one of our other topics of disruption (UAP) can be plotted on a similar curve thanks to the brilliant Lester Nare (founder of www.uapcacuss.com) but we’ll save that discussion for another day.
Up until now, people have been amazed by technical capabilities of ChatGPT when they try it out, but its practical applications have been primarily used by the “early adopter” group after the “innovators” created this tech. But with iPhone bringing AI features to the new version of software, we’re about to leap right into the “Early Majority” phase of adoption, because 87% of US teens use an iPhone. Over half of all phone users in the United States are on iPhone, and globally there are over 1.5 billion folks getting annoyed at Siri for turning on the lights instead of adding cheese to the grocery list (and Siri is going to get a huge upgrade with Apple’s new OpenAI Partnership too).
This update is entering beta testing next week, and will be pushed out to all iPhone users (with newer iPhones being able to use more features) in the coming months. The point here though is what we’ve been saying for a while now: The AI disruption is happening, it’s not slowing down, and its going to change the way we are interacting with technology, each other, and the world around us. It is transformative - provided your leadership is ready to help people adapt to it!
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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