Blogpost

by Dr. Marko Niinimaki, faculty member at CSII.

When I’m writing these blog posts I keep reminding myself that it is often really difficult to predict if a product or a service will be successful. Many of our students (and faculty) know this from their experience. CSII is geared towards innovations and startups. Some of those (but not all) will be successful. To state the obvious, my colleagues are working hard with the students to bring the best ideas forward and to prevent mistakes that could ruin an otherwise great product.

We often talk about technical, social or market disruptions. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary describes that kind of disruption as a “significant change to an industry or market due to innovation (= new ideas or methods) in technology”. Small scale disruptions happen quite often. Maybe somebody came up with an idea of a better tiling for sidewalks in Bangkok (they don’t crack as often as they did). In the case of my previous post’s network defender, Intel first came up with an idea that allowed us to process network packets directly in the operating system’s memory. This made it possible to build powerful network processors without expensive special hardware, as we did in Bangkok.

How about disruptions so big that they really change the world? Even these can often be a sequence of cumulative small innovations, or repurposing technology that was developed earlier (everyone should watch Connections, a TV series by James Burke about this topic). That does not change the fact that the World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN around 1989 really did change the world. A crucial part of its success was that in 1993 CERN decided to make the WWW technology public domain. One of the first software products to utilize this brand new publicly available technology was called Mosaic (see my previous post).

Will the new wave of Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT be something that changes the world as thoroughly as the web has done? There are some parallels in the adoption of these technologies. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s big established companies and fresh startups brought “web enabled” products and services to the market almost every month.¹ Now lots of companies want to do “AI enabled” things. Many governments, too, started national digital literacy and internet organizations in the late 1990’s. Now these governments want to have AI strategies (that is of course great for a faculty like CSII).

But how disrupting could a new technology be? The table below is from a textbook of futurology printed in 2000.

Predictions of the future are safe in a way that if they don’t turn out to be true, you can say it will happen later. But it is interesting to see that the #1 “most likely to disappear” job was a human agent, and those kinds of agents are now being replaced or augmented by AI.

I had some more teasers in my previous post. Was the network defender device successful? Was the World Wide Web used as I thought it was? Was Facebook pointless? You probably know some of the answers.The network defender product was moderately successful but did not sell millions of units. The engineering company that built it was later merged with another company in Singapore.² There are many great education platforms that run on the web, like Khan Academy and Wikipedia, but the huge majority of web sites and pages are not about education.³ Facebook is still successful and I had misunderstood their business model. I did not see that by letting their users submit semi-personal information about themselves, Facebook (and similar platforms) can mine this information to create personalized advertising.

References

1. Including the “Internet of smell” 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISmell

2. That makes sense. An IT consultancy company can sell the defender as a part of IT solutions, not just as an individual device.

3. Estimates of the amount of adult content on the web vary https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090. Today of course a lot of web traffic is video streaming.

ALSO READ: Previous Blogpost: This Changed The World (Or Not)