“For what purposes will it be useful?”
In 1840, at the dawn of the information age, the king of Sardinia asked Charles Babbage what nearly instant messaging like the telegraph could possibly be good for.
Twenty years later, it was obvious.
When I first saw Prodigy in 1986, I saw that the consumer internet would have many possibilities, but I didn’t have the guts to ask what I was missing. “In 40 years, for what purposes will it be useful” would have been a productive way to think about the change that was happening.
AI is as big a change as the internet, perhaps more so. And in just a few years, people will wonder why we weren’t wondering better.