Here’s another in my occasional attempts to make sense of the torrent that is AI-related news worth paying attention to:
United Blocks Purchase Agents – United Airlines joins Amazon in banning AI agents from transacting on site. Don’t read this as a safety and privacy issue; that’s what they claim. But this is really about who owns the customer, and who has informational leverage. It’s not who has the agents, it’s who has the agency. And United wants to keep it for themselves. I doubt their refusals will last.
Former Meta Policy Chief Rips Into Valley – Nick Clegg was a conservative UK politician who pivoted into Meta as its head of comms and policy. He left when Trump II was inaugurated. In the wake of the blue tsunami that’s rejected the Valley, he’s written a broadside against the industry that’s well worth reading. He asks why the Valley insisted on cozying up to Trump, and why they didn’t realize that politics is best left to those who actually understand it. Key quotes:
“I am always struck by how eagerly smart and wealthy people expound on subjects about which they know very little—especially politics. Their commercial success seems to foster in them a view that politics is easy, if only dim-witted officeholders would listen to them. It is this hubris that makes the Valley such an exhilarating and exasperating place.”
“Why should anyone care that a handful of powerful tech executives messed up trying to play politics? … AI still has the potential to serve humanity’s interests instead of becoming its master. But that potential will be realized only if we have smart, thoughtful people in both Silicon Valley and Washington prepared to work together regardless of partisan allegiance to help spread the technology’s benefits across society. The transactional alliance we have seen over the last couple of years couldn’t be further from that ideal.”
Tool, Not Creature: Jaron Lanier Piles On, Cites Religion – VR and industry pioneer Jaron Lanier has a top-tier critic of the tech industry over the past 15 years. He picks up where Clegg left off, writing in a NYT OpEd that tech’s narrative around AI is not only wrong, it’s dangerous and amounts to forcing religious beliefs onto all of us. Key quotes:
“Americans are not rejecting A.I. They are rejecting the way Silicon Valley is defining it for them.”
“A substantial portion of the A.I. community… support[s] any action or statement that reinforces the idea that the technology is like a deity… Someone’s metaphysical beliefs should be protected and are none of my business. It is also reasonable for nonbelievers to refuse the imposition of a religion from others.”
“Agents are often more rituals of belief than technological necessities…If you see A.I. as a tool — not a creature — you can then ask the correct question: Do we really need agents all the time?”
“..the future of A.I. … is ours if we can dispense with the illusion that this technology should replace us instead of help us.”
Anthropic IPO Is Going Exactly As Planned – Two links here. First, a Bloomberg piece reporting that the imminent offering is significantly oversubscribed, as expected. The FOMO is oh so palpable. If it goes as planned, it will be the biggest IPO haul in history – even bigger than SpaceX. Think about that when you think about this second link: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei talking his book in Anthropic’s IPO Roadshow video. The good stuff is at the end, and it’s…disturbing. Amodei seems a bit keyed up, and predicts the end of disease, and a winner takes all framework for “the right” AI company, which, of course, is Anthropic. It’s quite a watch given the context laid out above by Clegg and Lanier. Key quotes:
“Things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, mental illness, these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade.”
“I believe the company which gets the risks right will also be the company that has the license to operate that society trusts and society believes can build the benefits in the right way.”
“If we do this right, we can create an age of miracles.”
Praise the Lord and pass the tokens, y’all.
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