I created my first AI-inspired project back in 1986 in Trinity. I’ve waited 40 years to make this observation: AI is breaking out of its "walled garden" and changing everything!
I created my first AI-inspired project back in 1986 in Trinity. I’ve waited 40 years to make this observation: #AI is breaking out of its "walled garden" and changing everything!
Back then we connected to the Dec 20 mainframe for our allocated couple of seconds at a time via a dumb terminal and flaky gandalf box. Over the decades I wondered why AI hadn’t "arrived." Yesterday I sat up and took notice when I read Josh Tyrangiel's incredibly comprehensive, readable roadmap of where AI is heading over the next 18 to 24 months.
I’ve always been a technology optimist—perhaps to a fault—even when the tech didn't meet my hopes. As a child, I couldn't understand why my parents couldn't just buy the hologram R2-D2 used to show Princess Leia's plea for help in Star Wars.
Books by Peter H. Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil and Buckminister Fuller inspired me to believe in the empowering message of technology's power to dematerialise, demonitise, democratise.
Working on the finges of tech in university, I realised a fundamental truth: almost any human activity that can be broken down into a series of steps can be productised by software.
However, I long believed this "productisation" faced three hard limits:
• Tacit Knowledge: Think of the deep, lived experience of surgeons, high court judges, and CEOs.
• Human Dexterity: Think of the deft, striking palette choices and brush strokes of Van Gogh's The Starry Night. Think of a visit to your dentist, I’m not ready for a robot arm holding a drill in my mouth, at least not without a blindfold and heavy anesthesia!
• Gatekeepers: The social, corporate, and governmental systems that, for better or worse, intermediate or throttle our access to products and services.
I founded our annual Dargan Forum as an antidote to the increasing pessimism about technology. Our Forum seeks to provide a way for people who have the knowledge and experience of positively harnessing tech, to share that with an increasing number of stakeholders that are bewildered by the speed and all consuming nature of technologies that are rapidly emerging.
Our annual themes have tracked this #AI's revent evolution:
• 2023: I talked about AI in the "Walled Garden." ChatGPT was trapped in a browser window; you had to manually move data in and out.
• 2024: I highlighted what became known as "Agentic AI." The tech began breaking out of the browser window to perform useful tasks across systems.
• 2025: I flagged the approach of "Companion AI." The era of always-on, ubiquitous AI assistance.
As our 2025 keynote, Dr. Adam Dorr, put it: the rise of AI and robotics is a "huge threat, but also an exhilarating, seismic opportunity." He concluded with the observation that we don’t have much time to prepare.
The next five years will be tumultuous, but for the optimists among us, they will be transformative if we harness technology effectively. So join us at our #DarganForum 2026 - June 24th and 25th in #DunLaoghaire - https://lnkd.in/dP4B7sWZ
Read the full piece in The Atlantic here: https://lnkd.in/d-MWgUDZ
#AI #FutureOfWork #DarganForum #TechOptimism #GenerativeAI
