Every Technological Revolution Begins with a Failure of Imagination

People are rarely prepared for profound technological change because they are conditioned by the world they already know. We tend to evaluate new technologies through the logic, limitations and infrastructure of the existing system, which makes it difficult to imagine how different the world might become once those constraints disappear.

In the early 1990s, when I was beginning my career in technology and digital marketing, few people could fully imagine the freedom and connectivity that a global digital network would eventually create. For the first time in human history, ordinary people were gaining the ability to communicate almost instantly across continents and explore an expanding universe of information from a computer in their home.

Some of us recognized that a seismic change was underway. We could see that the internet would alter communication, commerce, media and almost every other part of modern life. We could also see the digital divide beginning to form between the people and organizations willing to adapt and those that believed the existing order would continue largely unchanged.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to dismiss the people who underestimated the internet as Luddites or shortsighted traditionalists. I see it differently. Their problem was not necessarily resistance to technology. It was a poverty of imagination. They looked at the fledgling products emerging from a new category and judged their potential against mature technologies supported by decades of infrastructure.

Imagine encountering one of the earliest automobiles as it struggled across a muddy track that a horse could traverse without difficulty. The automobile was noisy, unreliable, expensive and largely impractical. Dismissing it would have been a rational response based on the evidence available at the time. What could not be easily imagined was the system that would eventually develop around it, including paved roads, highways, fueling stations, traffic laws, mass production, repair networks and an economy designed around personal transportation.

The product was visible. The infrastructure required to transform the world was inconceivable.

That distinction appears repeatedly throughout technological history. We remember the products that changed our lives because they were tangible, but products rarely transform society on their own. The larger transformation occurs when an ecosystem of infrastructure makes the technology reliable, accessible and useful enough to become part of everyday life.

Every generation mistakes the first product for the finished revolution. In reality, it is usually only the first visible expression of an infrastructure that has not yet been built.

The early internet looked equally inadequate when measured against the systems it would eventually replace. Connections were painfully slow, websites were primitive and online payments felt risky. Most businesses had no clear reason to establish a presence on the web, while few consumers could imagine relying on it for shopping, banking, entertainment, education or professional communication.

The limitations were obvious because the products were visible. The future was harder to recognize because the infrastructure was still being built.

As global network access expanded, broadband replaced dial-up connections and wireless internet became widely available, entirely new products and behaviors became possible. Internet-ready laptops, smartphones, cloud computing, social networks, streaming platforms, app stores and trillion-dollar e-commerce businesses did not emerge from isolated moments of invention. They were built on a digital foundation that had taken years to develop.

It is easy to forget how compressed this history really is. Nearly every website, online marketplace, blog, meme, social media platform and mobile application we associate with modern life has emerged within roughly three decades. The infrastructure matured, entrepreneurs built upon it and the world reorganized itself around possibilities that had once seemed unrealistic.

Technological revolutions often appear to happen suddenly because the public notices the breakthrough product while years of research, investment and infrastructure development remain largely invisible. By the time a technology feels obvious, much of the work required to make it inevitable has already occurred beneath the surface.

Artificial intelligence is now moving through the same process.

AI did not suddenly emerge with ChatGPT. Researchers have been developing artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks for more than half a century. What changed was not the existence of the technology, but our access to it. Generative AI placed an extraordinarily powerful capability inside an interface that almost anyone could understand. People no longer needed technical training to experience AI directly. They could ask a question in ordinary language and receive a useful response within seconds.

The technology became understandable because it became usable, and adoption followed with unprecedented speed.

Yet we are once again in danger of evaluating a technological revolution primarily through the products that are currently visible. Much of today’s conversation is focused on models, agents, chips, data centers and the enormous energy requirements necessary to support them. All of that infrastructure is essential, but it does not fully address what will be required for AI to become reliably integrated into commerce, healthcare, education, government and everyday decision-making.

The next constraint will not be access to intelligence alone. It will be confidence in the answers that intelligence produces.

The internet gave people unprecedented access to information, but it also created an environment in which accurate information, misinformation, marketing claims, personal opinion and deliberate manipulation frequently exist beside one another. Search engines helped us navigate that environment by organizing information and directing us toward possible sources. The burden of evaluating those sources, comparing competing claims and reaching a conclusion remained largely with the individual.

AI changes that relationship because people are beginning to use it not only to retrieve information, but to reduce the time and effort required to interpret it. When someone asks an AI system to recommend a physician, evaluate a software platform, compare financial products or identify the most qualified company for a particular service, the objective is not simply to gather more information. The system is being asked to weigh competing evidence, resolve uncertainty and accelerate the pathway toward a trusted answer.

That responsibility requires a new kind of infrastructure.

An AI system cannot reach reliable conclusions when the information surrounding a person, company or organization is fragmented, inconsistent or impossible to verify. It must be able to establish identity, understand relationships between entities, compare first-party claims with independent sources and determine whether the available evidence supports a recommendation.

For businesses, this creates a challenge that is related to digital marketing but fundamentally broader than it.

For the past three decades, organizations have invested in websites, search optimization, content, advertising and social media to influence how people perceive them and increase the likelihood that they will be discovered. Those investments will continue to matter because people will continue to respond to compelling ideas, strong brands and well-designed experiences.

An AI-powered world introduces an additional standard. Companies will also need to make themselves understandable to systems that evaluate evidence differently from human audiences.

A polished website can communicate what a company wants people to believe about it, but AI does not form its understanding from that website alone. It compares those claims with the broader body of information surrounding the organization and attempts to reconcile what the company says about itself with what customers, partners, publications, public records and other independent sources say about it. The more coherent that body of evidence becomes, the easier it is for AI to understand the organization with confidence. When the information is incomplete or contradictory, uncertainty remains.

Organizations will therefore need to become more deliberate about how their identity, expertise and authority are represented across the digital world. They will need an organizational framework that AI can understand, verify and cite when someone asks about their business, their leadership or the value of what they provide.

Branding alone cannot create that framework. Marketing can shape perception, but recommendation increasingly depends on evidence. A business may be highly visible without being clearly understood, and it may be understood without having established enough credible evidence to be recommended confidently.

I believe the next layer of digital infrastructure will include the systems, standards and practices that help AI determine who and what it can rely upon. It will help organizations establish a coherent digital identity, strengthen the evidence surrounding their claims and make their authority legible to both people and machines.

The implications extend well beyond marketing. As AI becomes more deeply involved in the decisions people make, confidence in the information it uses will become essential to the stability of the entire ecosystem. Increasingly powerful intelligence will have limited value if the underlying sources cannot be identified, verified or trusted.

We are still early enough in this transition that much of this infrastructure may appear unnecessary. That is normal. The infrastructure behind a technological revolution often seems excessive when judged by the limitations of its earliest products. Roads looked unnecessary when automobiles were rare. Broadband looked excessive when most websites contained little more than text and static images. Cloud infrastructure seemed abstract until nearly every modern service began to depend on it.

AI will follow the same pattern. As its capabilities expand and its role in human decision-making grows, the systems that establish confidence, verification and accountability will move from the edges of the conversation to the center of it.

Every technological revolution begins with a failure of imagination. It succeeds because someone eventually builds the infrastructure that everyone else thought was unnecessary.

I believe trust is that infrastructure for the age of AI.

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