Fundamental Traits
- Pervasiveness – Used across a wide range of sectors and industries
- Technological Dynamism – Continuously improves and supports ongoing innovation
- Innovation Complementarity – Enables or requires complimentary innovations in other fields
- Wide Economic Impact – Significantly effects productivity, growth & economic structures
- Generativity / Spillover Effects – Leads to unanticipated uses and new industries or societal transformations
- Optional Trait – Starts imperfect or expensive, and becomes transformative when matures
Chronological List
- Fire (~1.5 million – 400,000 BCE)
- Language (spoken) (~100,000–50,000 BCE)
- Domestication of Animals and Plants (~10,000 BCE)
- The Wheel (~3500 BCE)
- Writing (~3000 BCE)
- Mathematics (~3000 BCE onward)
- Iron and Steel (~1200 BCE onward)
- Money / Coinage (~600 BCE)
- Water Power (~100 BCE onward)
- Paper (~100 BCE, China)
- Gunpowder (~9th century, China)
- Optics (Lenses, Glass, Telescopes, Microscopes) (13th–17th century)
- Clock / Timekeeping (14th century mechanical clocks; ancient sundials earlier)
- Printing Press (1440, Gutenberg)
- Steam Engine (1712–1770s)
- Electricity (late 1800s)
- Internal Combustion Engine (1870s–1880s)
- Telecommunications (1870s onward)
- Chemical Industry (late 19th century)
- Electronics (20th century)
- Computers (1930s–1950s onward)
- Standardized Containers / Logistics (e.g., Shipping Containers) (1950s)
- Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (1950s–present, transformative since 2010s)
- Internet (1960s–1990s)
- GPS / Satellite Technology (1970s onward)
- Biotechnology (1970s–present)
- Software Platforms (Operating Systems, Protocols, App Ecosystems) (1980s–present)
- Nanotechnology (1990s–present)
- Renewable Energy Technologies (2000s–present)
- Advanced Robotics & Automation (2000s–present)
- Quantum Computing (emerging, 2020s–future)
- Synthetic Intelligence / Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) (emerging, 2020s–future)
Examples of emerging AI Assistants
- ChatGPT is a General Purpose AI Assistant – creative tasks, casual chat, productivity tools (GPT-4)
- Perplexity is an AI-Powered Search Engine – research, factual updates, scenarios with citations (GPT-4, web search integration)
- Claude is an AI-Powered Technical Analyst – technical writing, code, long-form analysis (Anthropic)
Use of AI Assistants
- Professional users combine results from multiple AI Assistants for best results
- Each has unique strengths and are quickly evolving
Use of AI Agents
- AI agents function as autonomous software systems that:
- perceive their environment
- reason through data
- make decisions
- take actions to achieve specific goals, often in a business contexts like automation or analysis
- AI agents operate through a cycle:
- input perception (user query or data trigger)
- reasoning (GPT or Llama models)
- action execution (API calls to databases)
- memory for context retention
- To set up an AI agent, start by defining the agent’s purpose (automation of some sort of activity), then connect data sources and deploy via webhooks or schedules.
- Test for reliability prior to scaling to teams and integrating into existing workflows.
Examples of emerging AI Agent Software
- CrewAI – Open-source framework for multi-agent systems, ideal for collaborative tasks (free starter agent – yes)
- MindStudio – Visual builder for no-code AI agents, supports templates for business tasks (free starter agent – yes)
- Dust.tt – Quick no-code agent creation with secure data connections to Slack, Google Drive or internal documents (free starter agent – no)
