Americans Make New Technology a Daily Habit at Record Speed

Cue the “2001: A Space Odyssey” theme: Human lives have always been shaped by new technology. You can track it (pardon the pun) from railroads to the internet to smartphones. Now, artificial intelligence is the latest tool transforming the way we live.

AI adoption just crossed an important line. Between December and January, the share of U.S. adults using AI for personal reasons leaped 5 percentage points to 54%, according to new PYMNTS Intelligence research. In other words, for all the backlash against the technology, most Americans are now using AI in their daily lives.

People aren’t just dabbling. Most of those users are mainstream or power users, performing eight or more tasks using AI each month. That’s a steep adoption curve. Take ChatGPT, the most popular consumer AI provider. PYMNTS data shows 83% of AI users have tried it at least once, and the platform wasn’t even made available to the public until the end of 2022.

This shift didn’t happen overnight. People might be more aware of their own AI usage when they’re, say, querying ChatGPT, but the technology has been part of Americans’ lives for some time now.

“One thing that surprises a lot of people is that they are already using a lot of AI without realizing it,” said Jason I. Hong, Ph.D., professor emeritus at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, in an interview with PYMNTS. “Any kind of speech recognition, search query, recommendation, news, map location, or online advertisement uses some form of AI. So, in that sense, AI is already here and has been for many years.”

Hong added that the cloud computing infrastructure already built for other popular technologies such as social media and video streaming has made it possible for AI to catch on so quickly.

In that way, AI is significantly different from some of the past leaps forward in consumer technology, which often took longer to reach that tipping point. Consider home electricity.

The Electric Feel

People have always been skeptical of new technology. Home electricity took decades to catch on, and holdouts certainly had their reasons. In 1889, there was a real backlash after multiple people died, electrocuted by the new wires.

As one article in a December 1889 issue of Harper’s Weekly (via Shells and Pebbles) warned:

“As things are at present, there is no safety, and danger lurks all around us. It may never reach you, or you may go on for years unhurt, but when the moment comes you are killed instantly. … A man ringing a doorbell or leaning up against a lamp post might be struck dead any instant.”

Home electricity didn’t really take off until the 20th century. According to Yale University’s Energy History, the share of homes wired for electricity rose from 1 in 7 in 1910 to 7 in 10 by 1930. The shift happened first in cities, because utility companies could get more bang for their buck in densely populated areas.

AI works differently. It isn’t tied to physical infrastructure in the same way, so there’s less variation from country to city. Even for people living in rural areas, most (51%) use AI, while for city dwellers, that figure rises to 60%.

Wherever they may be, most American households already have what they need to use AI: Wi-Fi. Almost all U.S. adults — 96%, according to the Pew Research Center — use the internet.

Speaking of which, where were you when the internet age dawned?

The World Wide Web

The internet spread much faster than electricity did. Data from the International Telecommunication Union shows that, in 1991, 1.2% of the U.S. population used the internet. One decade later in 2001, that figure was up to nearly half (49%). By then, people were already shopping on eBay and Amazon. They might not have been able to ask ChatGPT their questions yet, but they could still ask Jeeves.

In the years after that, as people left the slow, screeching days of dial-up behind for the convenience of broadband, usage exploded even more. By 2005, more than 2 in 3 American adults were surfing the web. At that time, Yahoo had nearly 100 million monthly users. Google was growing by millions every month. That was also the year when SNL’s “Lazy Sunday” was first posted to YouTube, elevating digital streaming to new levels of visibility.

Still, it took until as recently as 2020 to reach the point where 90% of U.S. adults were using the internet.

Of course, the web also looks very different now than it did decades ago. With the rise of smartphones, the internet became part of people’s lives not just at home and at work, but wherever they went.

Hold the Phone

Smartphones went mainstream even faster. The first iPhone came out in June 2007, and by January 2013, more than half of all American adults said they owned a smartphone, per Pew. Now, 91% do.

The trend is clear: Adoption curves keep getting steeper. Even so, the pattern of technological revolutions hasn’t changed all that much.

“Revolutions in technology … follow a similar social arc. First, they are spectacular and overhyped. [Later,] they become integrated into the most fundamental aspects of our lives,” said Joshua Copeland, adjunct professor of information technology at Tulane University and director of cybersecurity at Crescendo, in an interview with PYMNTS. “The electric revolution mechanized the scale of power; the … internet revolutionized the scale of information; and [AI] is likely revolutionizing the scale of thought.”

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