The Disappearance of AI

Navigating data increasingly requires artificial intelligence just to be able to organize that data.Kurt Cagle 2019 All things come to an end, especially economic cycles. People who have logged more than a couple of decades in information technology especially are attuned to it, because their jobs and interests both tend to be very forward facing - the inability of a software developer or information manager to read the future, at least in a general sense, usually means that they won't last long in the field. As the markets enter into the gyrations of this last December, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average now down 16% from the year's highs, the thought that the party would never end is now giving way to the notion that maybe it's time to grab the car keys and bid the hosts adieu, and those of us in IT are battening down the hatches in a serious way. I started writing these year end predictions way back in 2003, at a time when "blogging" was still considered a novel thing, and Google had just wrested the mantle of king of the search engines away from Alta Vista. Fifteen years later, with my then three year old baby girl now heading to college and my red hair and beard now gone mostly white, the landscape has changed, most of the big players have changed (who knew Microsoft would eventually end up migrating to Linux), and the buzzwords are now almost a different language, yet at the same time, the patterns that underlie tech remain very predictable. Business cycles, most economists have noticed, follow an eight to ten year pattern, usually with a bit of a wobble at the halfway point, and you can make a pretty compelling argument that there's a broader cycle that's double that, between eighteen and twenty years, where the economic crises oscillate between equity crashes (typically accompanied by commercial real estate disintegration) and mortgage (or residential real estate) collapses.