Are we really seeing a digital revolution 2.0?

 The philosopher Thomas Kuhn once divided the history of science, somewhat simplified, into two forms of periods. The first period is when science is undergoing business as usual and even though small progress is made, it does not count as a scientific revolution. The second form of period is when science radically expands through new findings and people becomes aware of these radical changes. This is something that Kuhn labells as a paradigm shift, in which the conditions for knowledge and knowledge production radically change. 

For the past two years the innovations in AI have sparked debate in which people think that we are living in a digital revolution. Some people would even profoundly put forward that this is the second digital revolution, with home computers being the first. This debate have invoked my scientific curiosity in two ways: firstly is this really a revolution or a paradigm shift? This is due to that the development with computers leading to ai can be seen as a long historical process, rather than a revolution in which events unfold at a speedy rate. The second theoretical problem this causes is the notion of AI in itself - are our new software really something new that will transform society profoundly or is it just a hype?

As a kid I belong to the generation that grow up after the burst of the IT-bubble in the early 2000's. I am therefor rather sceptical about hype in the IT industry since it sometimes is just a false alarm. If I were to discuss a clear cut digital revolution ut would not be the launch of the home computers, perhaps not even the launch of the internet. Instead I would see this as a prelude to the launch of HTML5, which over night turned the industry upside down and profoundly changed the conditions of the internet. 

The second criticism is based on the notion that whilst AI most certainly is useful - another way of writing a cool gadget - I do not fully see how it actually have transformed anything yet. Apart from creating bad custom services where it's impossible to interact with a human these days, AI have yet to leave a permanent mark in society. This perhaps becomes most clear in all of the alarms of AI usage in higher education - where students time and again are proven to have cheated through the use of AI. Whilst it might eventually evolve into something that actually can fool a human, I have yet to se a clear example. I would also say that the way some students use AI - as a teacher or providing them with summaries of text - are not different from students from high income homes with networks of their own to help them with an assignment. In this regard - AI can perhaps be used as a tool to levelling the playing field between social classes, but that might also be it.

So to return to Kuhns paradigm-idea I think it is safe to conclude that whilst a broad amount of actors tey to create a hype for AI it has yet to prove its worth. After all, creating the hype is just part of Kuhns paradigm, the hard part is to actually contribute to science.


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