AI Is Just Another Napster Moment
Artificial Intelligence is just another piece of new technology that came into our world and won't leave us anytime soon.
Against it in any shape or form? Tough break. The future doesn’t need your permission.
Got you trigged, eh? Hehe. But don’t zone out just yet, because we’ve seen this play out before.
In 1999, an innovative piece of software shook the world of music to its foundations and changed its distribution forever. Suddenly, it became possible for billions of people to get their hands on any piece of audio they wanted, for however long they wanted it… for free.
That piece of software was Napster.
A medium that people were used to pay for suddenly became available free of charge. Not held back by any real regulations or laws, music found its way into countless households. No more need for expensive records or CDs—just a few minutes of bandwidth, and that brand new album would be on your personal MP3 player.
Good news for the people, bad news for the artists. It took quite some time for Napster and its follow-ups to be replaced by software that regulated this kind of music sharing, helping to balance the scale again. Today, we can’t imagine a world without a service like Spotify to rely on for our daily music consumption. Although its still not completely accepted, given the protests we see every day arguing that these streaming services don't pay artists enough for their products.
Technology has surprised us many times before, and each time, it took a while for people to come to terms with the new reality in which they suddenly found themselves.
VCRs were once said to enable piracy, and it took a while before the Supreme Court eventually decided that some sorts of VCR use indeed were, but that something like home recording was legal. It showed that it was all about finding the right balance.
Digital Rights Management might be an example of something that tipped the balance in the fight against piracy too far, limiting a user’s rights and freedom to access content they purchased. Only now does it seem we’ve found a workable way to use it in a way that works for most of us.
New apps like Uber and Lyft have disrupted the world of ride-sharing and faced legal battles because taxi drivers have not been able to find their place in this new reality.
History tends to repeat itself. And after all of the above, we now have AI to worry about. And again, people are shouting from both sides—some in favor of, and others against, this shiny new thing. People love it for its possibilities, while others see only the problems and condemn it for legal reasons and copyright infringement.
Whatever your opinion is doesn’t matter. AI has arrived, and it won’t leave. Like every other invention that caught us off guard, AI is the next big, scary thing. But as we’ve seen with all the innovations before it, it will just take some time to get used to and regulate in a way that’s accepted by most people.
And then we can prepare for another round of innovation.