Followed by decades long monopoly over expensive new technology, likely crushing waves of innovation and usage, in exchange for slow, buggy, not-even-automated spreadsheets; plus the hemming of governments and organizations into endless software rental contracts and platforms, that maybe don't add value as fast as Moore's Law.
that's a fair criticism, however it's not a given that any product category will end up with the same growth curve of PCs, the web, cloud, and mobile.
thinking back on the PC, Web, cloud, and mobile growth periods, each came with a transformative change in the capabilities, cost, and availability of computing power. We're only seeing two of these aspects in AI today - with the cost side heading in the wrong direction.
AI supercharged the importance of computing power to arms-race levels. We're still just brute forcing it with Deep Learning, but the capabilities are too awesome to ignore.
Therefore, compute power will be bought-up and hoarded expensively, and used on the highest bidder. Will the market save us, and simply over-clock production? Not happening yet. Corporate appetite should be quite large. I do A.I. R&D and am just watching the mountain of power ascend before me and aged gaming laptop. My next level is yet the foothills. Yeah, I'd say growth or not, A.I. is going where PC, web, cloud, everything, goes, to the industrial monopolists and the money spenders.
I work in industrial AI research as well, but I think it's worth considering whether AI is providing an incremental benefit on existing products through the use of imense computing power - or unlocking new demand through new applications. If the latter category is limited by available compute, then we'll reach the limits of economically viable use cases rather quickly without the aid of moore's law.
