Yesterday I wrote about the history of AI and it's growth rings:
Form: thinking formalised
Adapt: learning from experience
Share: acting with us
Let's speculate for the next ring of growth. Here are 3 plausible candidates:
Option A: Reflect
Intelligence as Understanding and Meaning
"To integrate learning into coherent understanding and purpose"
Focus: Sensemaking, self-awareness, ethical and interpretive intelligence
e.g. models that explain and critique own reasoning
Making sense visible
Option B: Design/Imagination
Intelligence as Creativity and Possibility
"To generate new realities, not just reinterpret the current ones"
Focus: Creative generation, simulation, speculation, moving from what is to imagining what could be (design)
e.g. simulation engines for drugs and health
Making imagination visible
Option C: Sustain
Intelligence as Stewardship and Continuity
"To maintain balance across systems over time"
Focus: Collective sustainability, alignment, and resilience
e.g. climate modelling and ecosystem optimisation
Making care visible
My speculative pick: Reflection
The first three rings traced the growth of agency (from formal thinking, to using the past and acting in the future), I actually think that this naturally leads to reflection.
Almost equivalent to being coached. Making what's valuable visible, and questioning that value but leaving agency with the client.
Making sense visible, machines (and humans with them) that not only learn and act,
but understand what they are learning and why it matters.
A reflection about reflection
The fourth growth ring will not form through regulation or design alone. It may be the hardest and slowest to grow. Reflection will only appear when understanding itself begins to delight customers and they pay.
A delighter product is disruptive. To value understanding is to invite curiosity, to slow optimisation, to question results. Until awareness delights the people who use it more than it threatens the ones who own it, this next ring could remain just beneath the bark.
Whether a fourth ring ever forms will tell us less about machines, and more about ourselves.