Before it changes the world, Al faces its 'hype cycle'

With adoption lagging behind investments, expectations of the tech are running far ahead of reality.

- Vikram Khanna

When the internet went mainstream in the early 1990s, it was widely touted as a technology that would change the world. That was not hype, although some early commentators thought it was, even deriding it as a passing fad.

But early on the road to becoming ubiquitous, the internet did go through a "hype cycle", in which thousands of companies popped up, making outlandish claims about how they were going to revolutionise their industries. Despite raising billions of dollars from eager venture capitalists, most of them disappeared during the dot.com bust of 2000-2001, when the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index lost about 80 per cent of its value.

Many new technologies, even if successful later, go through hype cycles during their early years. In the 19th century, the hype was over railroads and the telegraph, which led to speculative investment bubbles, followed by mass bankruptcies. In recent years, technologies such as 3-D printing, virtual reality and blockchain have had their own mini-hype cycles, delivering far less than they initially promised.

The latest technology that is in the throes of a hype-cycle is artificial intelligence (AI), which some commentators view as being potentially even more impactful than the internet.

This is plausible. While the internet mainly revolutionised how information is shared and accessed, AI has the potential to automate a wide range of cognitive tasks once considered exclusive to humans. Its impact could be broader than the internet in that it has the potential to transform every sector.