GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker
Earlier this week, news that a Chinese startup called DeepSeek created a workable AI competitor to ChatGPT sent shock waves through Silicon Valley and Washington. In what is being called a “Sputnik Moment,” DeepSeek’s breakthrough has turned the $100 billion Stargate AI initiative that President Trump announced last week into an “Interstellar Graveyard,” noted a post on Fancaiju, a business blog on WeChat.
DeepSeek shocked the world with its new AI offering, which it developed for $5 million, contrasting sharply with the billions that OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google spent developing theirs. Result: a $1 trillion bloodbath on Wall Street and an assumption-assaulting moment heard worldwide.
While DeepSeek’s claims have yet to be verified, gone in a nanosecond is the assumption that the US is ahead of China in the AI arms race. Gone, too, is the assumption that only big tech firms with deep pockets can dominate the AI space.
The larger point here is that we now live in a world where making assumptions or going along unthinkingly with conventional wisdom can lead us into the jaws of disruption. In the Age of Acceleration, we can choose to challenge our assumptions, or somebody else will do it for us. (If they do, it won’t be pretty.)
As an innovation coach and futurist, I teach managers the techniques of identifying and “assaulting” individual, organizational, and big-picture assumptions, often called paradigms. I explain that assumptions are what everybody believes to be true … until it isn’t, as DeepSeek appears to have demonstrated. And I show how innovation begins where assumptions end.
Challenging assumptions is essential, whether personal (“I’m too old/young to do that”), organizational (“that’s not how we do things around here”), or national (“America is way out ahead in AI”).
One technique is to ask open-ended questions and invite new thinking. For example: “what’s a better way to do X?” is such a challenging question because it opens the mind to the realization that the way we do X currently might be obsolete.
In researching a book about navigating a world of hyper-change, I realized we will all need to build muscle mass in this area. The world is moving too fast to harbor erroneous assumptions. We are now living through an “inflection point” that is unlike anything in history. Over the coming decade, there will be more social, technological, and geopolitical change than over the past 100 years. And we are not ready for this world of constant overdrive.
The forces that will characterize this period are becoming clearer: the rise of authoritarianism both in the United States and globally; the pervasiveness of social media and the diminishment of freedom and human consciousness; China vs. the USA race for world dominion; and, most importantly, the burgeoning AI Revolution.
We now live in a world of exponential change, a clear departure in the human experience. Something that happens in a lab in Wuhan explodes into a global pandemic. And something that happens in a startup lab in China wipes out a trillion dollars in market value overnight. In such a world, assumptions are like barnacles on the side of a boat.
DeepSeek not only vaporizes assumptions we may have made about AI but also the future of humanity. One such assumption is that AI will lead us into the promised land. Silicon Valley promulgates this assumption with passionate intensity. It is techno-determinism writ large: If we can invent it, it must be a good thing for society.
But all too often, while technology brings about clear and immediate benefits – it has unintended consequences that become evident over time.
In 2011, 23 percent of teenagers in the United States and Western countries owned a smartphone, meaning they had only limited access to social media; most had to use the family computer to access the internet. But by 2016, 79 percent of teens owned a smartphone, as did 28 percent of children ages eight to 12. Teens indicated they spent an average of almost seven hours a day on screens. Researchers found that one out of every four young people admitted that they were “almost constantly” online. This meant that they spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, according to researchers. Instead, they withdrew from “embodied social behaviors” essential for successful human development.
As researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and others have observed, signs of a mental health crisis began to emerge. Rates of mental illness among the young shot up dramatically in many Western countries between 2010 and 2015. Major depression among teens went up 145 percent among girls, and 161 percent among boys. A similar rise in anxiety disorders occurred.
Will AI have similar benefits and unintended consequences? Champions of AI see positive progress and productivity.
“Every person will have an AI assistant, coach, mentor, trainer, advisor, and therapist who is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful,” observes Marc Andreessen in a widely read essay on why AI will save the world. “Your AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.”
Perhaps AI will lead us to the promised land, but only if we challenge our assumptions, and consciously shape the future.
This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Gemini
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