Is artificial intelligence having its lightbulb moment? – Rowan Simpson

The early years of electricity were marked by both wonder and skepticism. Photo / Boonchai Wedmakawand

THREE KEY FACTS

• Artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025 is expected to be transformative, akin to electricity’s historical impact.
• The real opportunity lies in automating mundane tasks, freeing humans for creative work.
• Successful AI applications will become invisible tools, solving real problems effectively and seamlessly.

In 1882, Thomas Edison threw the switch at Pearl Street Station in Lower Manhattan, providing electric light to 82 customers. Some saw it as a novelty – a cleaner, safer alternative to gas lighting.

Others recognised it as a transformative new technology that would reshape civilisation. They were all correct, in their way, but none could have predicted how completely electricity would eventually weave itself into the fabric of modern life.

Or how long that would take – nearly 150 years later, we continue to debate the merits of electric vehicles, for example, and many households still literally cook with gas.

If you believe many of those trying to guess what 2025 has in store, this could be the year that machines take over – artificial intelligence (AI) will apparently change everything.

As with any new technology, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the snake oil from the substance. Having worked with start-ups for decades, I think back to Edison and ask: what if the opposite is true? Might we overestimate AI’s short-term potential while underestimating its longer-term impact?

The early years of electricity were marked by both wonder and skepticism. For many years it remained primarily confined to wealthy neighbourhoods while most businesses continued with gas lighting, regarding electricity as an expensive luxury. But gradually, this new technology transformed every aspect of our economy: from manufacturing to household appliances to communications.

Fast forward to today. When a new café opens, no one calls it a “technology company” just because they use an electric espresso machine. When a manufacturer improves their production line, the press release doesn’t breathlessly announce their “innovative use of electrical power.”

Electricity has become infrastructure – invisible yet indispensable, powerful yet pedestrian. But it wasn’t always this way. In electricity’s early days, the mere presence of electric lighting drew crowds. People would gather to marvel at illuminated shop windows. Companies would add “electric” to their names just to seem cutting-edge, much like many businesses today scrambling to add “AI” to their marketing materials.

AI has suddenly captured our collective attention, with public perception shifting rapidly from “interesting research project” to “existential threat.” Job displacement is a common concern – a valid worry, but one that may take longer to materialise than those trying to sell these new tools might prefer.

I think of it like this: we’ve harnessed a new form of electricity, but we’re still working out what it’s good for. When I press people to share specific examples of how they’ve personally used AI in their work, the responses are telling. More often than not, they struggle to give any meaningful examples.

They’re enticed by the idea, but haven’t found non-trivial applications. I’m more interested in the people who realise that the revolution isn’t the technology itself, but the entirely new things that can be built on that platform – for example, medical researchers using AI to identify patterns in patient data, freeing up time for deeper analysis; or teachers developing ways to provide more personalised feedback for students, rather than just worrying about plagiarism.

They understand something crucial: the real opportunity is to automate the mundane and repeatable, freeing ourselves for the creative and uniquely human work that matters most. If we use AI to do the opposite, that would be a depressing outcome.

When pioneering computer scientist Danny Hillis observed that “technology is everything that doesn’t work yet”, he captured something profound about how we think about innovation.

Once something works reliably – once it becomes useful rather than merely novel – we stop seeing it as “technology” and start seeing it simply as a tool. Consider autocorrect, a feature so ubiquitous that we barely notice it anymore – except when it fails. Today, powered by AI language models, it has become remarkably accurate. And precisely because it works so well, we’ve stopped thinking of it as “technology” at all.

The most successful applications of AI will likely follow this pattern – the term “AI” will fade into the background, leaving only the practical value these tools bring to our lives. The companies that succeed won’t be the ones that simply add “AI” to their product names – they’ll be the ones that solve real problems in ways that become invisible because they just work.

So as we look to the future, don’t be dazzled by what might seem like magic, or worry about the robots taking your job. Take the time to understand how it works. Be willing to experiment. You might be wrong, initially, but you’ll learn a lot in the process. Start with the problems you need to solve, then work backward to understand how this new technology might help.

Flick the switch, but don’t just stare at the lights in awe – give yourself the opportunity to invent the future.