Gigaom AI Minute – November 8

Transcript

How much is the internet worth? It's a hard question to answer. You can maybe add up the market cap of all the various internet companies and you’d get a number somewhere between five and ten trillion dollars, but that doesn't really tell the whole story, does it? Because the internet has enhanced the value of all companies that have used it.

Maybe it would be better to look at the problem a different way. How much would it cost to get you to give up the internet for the rest of your life? For many people there is almost no price, certainly not for a million dollars. So no matter how you add it all up the internet is worth tens of trillions of dollars.

Why is this important? Well the GDP of the whole planet is only 80 trillion and the combined wealth of everybody alive is only about 250 trillion dollars. So the idea that the internet is worth maybe 10% of the combined wealth of the planet is really fascinating. If you went back to 1995 and you asked people what would be the value of connecting a bunch of computers together with a common protocol no one would have said tens of trillions of dollars in value would be created in two decades, but that's what happened.

Why is this important with regard to artificial intelligence? Well, as transformative technologies, AI is much bigger than the internet and so we can expect in the same, or even shorter, time period a much more dramatic financial impact of the planet.