From the time our ancestors discovered fire to today’s solar and nuclear power plants, we have witnessed energy revolutions that have fueled human progress. But that’s not all: there have also been information revolutions – from the birth of language to writing, from printing to telephony, and, of course, the internet.
Now here we are, in the midst of the web era, overwhelmed as if by a raging river. Our daily life, our species, our society, everything has changed. It hasn’t even been two decades, and we’ve gone from not knowing whether it was summer or winter in Brazil to being constantly informed about what’s happening on the other side of the world. In the end, we feel it close, as if it were right next to us. The world has become small, and perhaps a little better, despite everything. Yes, with ups and downs…
But there’s more. Illiteracy is becoming a thing of the past, and with it, population growth is slowing down. Women are studying, working, and the world, step by step, seems to be moving towards a slightly more sustainable future.
But there’s something that’s growing and getting worse: digital bureaucracy. Yes, that dark forest of rules, numbers, documents, and interfaces that seem to come out of a Kafkaesque nightmare. Who hasn’t cursed the municipal website while trying to pay a fine, right? Worse than the fine itself!
The realm of the absurd: we, the sapiens, with two million years of linguistic evolution behind us, after writing the Odyssey, now find ourselves pressing buttons on glossy screens like neurotic monkeys at the zoo. But, we believe, things are about to change: thanks to Generative Artificial Intelligence.
Did you think Generative Artificial Intelligence would only serve to make us laugh and cry with online content? That too. But the real magic lies in its power to change the way we interact with the digital world. Imagine being able to talk to a database as if it were an old friend. “Give me the addresses of the customers?” Done. And in the blink of an eye, without needing to know SQL.
An agent with Generative Artificial Intelligence could even navigate that awful municipal website for you. No matter how complicated it is: it doesn’t give up in front of a bad interface (but you still have to pay the fine).
And now, the million-dollar question (or rather, billion-dollar): how much is this technology worth? Look at OpenAI: from zero to 90 billion in no time. And Nvidia, with its microchips that run these software, is approaching a capitalization of almost a thousand billion.
A bubble? Maybe. But it might be not. If we think about the astronomical increases in market capitalizations in past years, who can say where we will arrive in a not-too-distant future? OpenAI, Nvidia, or some unknown new player – someone will scale these new heights. And we will be here, perhaps more neurotic, perhaps less, but certainly more connected to our digital world.
