Every so often I am asked to participate in a survey fielded by Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future. As you might expect, this year’s survey focuses on the impact of AI, and includes this prompt:
If you do think it is likely that AI systems will begin to play a much more significant role in shaping our decisions, work and daily lives: How might individuals and societies embrace, resist and/or struggle with such transformative change? As opportunities and challenges arise due to the positive, neutral and negative ripple effects of digital change, what cognitive, emotional, social and ethical capacities must we cultivate to ensure effective resilience? What practices and resources will enable resilience? What actions must we take right now to reinforce human and systems resilience? What new vulnerabilities might arise and what new coping strategies are important to teach and nurture?
It’s rare that a survey asks its respondents to actually write something cogent and long form, so I figured I’d publish my response here. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts! If you’d like to participate, the link to the survey is here.
The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for nearly five decades. Half my family is buried there.
If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding – everyone tells you to enjoy it, to remember every detail. But decades later, all you can recall is leaving the reception, relieved that everyone seemed to have a good time.
The Iron Door, California’s Oldest Saloon. (It had a pay phone in the back).
Living at the cutting edge of technology in the early ’90s required either a magical token forged of copper and silver, or the capacity to memorize a ridiculously long string of numbers. Either the token or the code would connect you to a vast telecommunications network driven by immense computers housed in bunker-like buildings scattered around the world.
Labor Day 1992. I squeezed into a pay phone behind the oldest bar in California, The Iron Door, pride of Groveland, California – the “gateway to Yosemite.” I never could remember my access code, but I did have a token – also known as a quarter – which I slipped into the pay phone, then dialed my voicemail, a state of the art service that cost me an extra five bucks a month. Back then everybody used voicemail, it was an asynchronous lifeline to the rest of the world.
An old friend asked me what I was up to the other day, and despite two years having passed since I started getting that question (here’s my first post on the subject), I realized I’ve not made much progress on a concise answer. Usually I’ll list the various projects that currently fill my day – working on the P&G Signal conference, trying my best to be a good board member at a number of media, tech, and data companies, managing various investments, and running a new health event I co-founded last year called DOC.
“Wait,” my friends invariably ask. “Why are you involved in a health project?!”
I’m going to try to write something difficult. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, but that’s kind of the point. This is how writers improve: We tackle something we’re not sure we can do. Along the way, I am committing a minor sin in the world of writing – I am writing about writing.
But wait, don’t bail, here’s a topical tidbit to keep you engaged: I’m also going to write about AI, and who doesn’t want to hear more about that?! My prompt, as it were, is “Audience of One,” a post by Mario Gabriele, who writes the interesting and hyperbolic newsletter The Generalist. Gabriele’s optimistic prose focuses on venture, startups, tech, and tech culture. I find his work thought provoking and sometimes infuriating. “Audience of One” falls into the latter category.
For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.”
Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine.
Earlier this week I met a fellow who, among very many other things, is a member of a bicycling group based where I live. Given that I live in a pretty small community, I was stunned I’d never heard of the club, which has 900 active members and runs four or five organized rides a week. How’d I miss it?
Well, the fellow told me, it’s a Facebook group. You should join! For the first time in ages, I fired up Facebook with the intention of actually doing something useful. I applied to join the group, then promptly forgot about it. I lost the habit of checking into Facebook more than a decade ago, and I have all notifications from the app turned off.
Well, 2024 is in the books, and it’s time to grade my own homework. One year ago I posted my 2024 predictions, fresh off a so-so showing in 2023. So how’d I do this time? Pretty well, actually. To the results:
But Progress Continues… For my second prediction, I gave myself something of an out – yes, AI will take a pause, but there will still be a lot of interesting developments. And progress did indeed continue – tens of thousands of startups are toiling away at possible breakthrough applications, Google released Gemini, NotebookLM, and integrated Gemini into its core search and office products, OpenAI released SearchGPT and its reasoning models, AI-driven video became a reality at scale, Apple launched “Intelligence,” and everyone was madly trying to make “the agentic web” a thing (more on that in my 2025 predictions). So, check, lots of progress despite the pause.
Big Tech’s Mid-life Crisis. “Every year it gets more difficult for the Amazons, Google, and Apples of the world to continue their ever-upward march” I wrote in defense of my third prediction, which inferred that the Apples, Googles, and Amazons of the world would, by year’s end, be seen in a worse light than at the start of 2024 (though I also said their stock prices would not suffer, and I certainly got that right!). While it’s not easy to prove, I think the narrative has largely held up. My reasoning here was that the tech industry was going to have to figure out what its role was in the world, now that it holds nearly limitless power. And I think that’s exactly what we got: The phrase “mid life crisis” certainly comes to mind for a particularly annoying group of big tech leaders – Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos and their peers, all of whom became players in a particularly florid drama involving acting out about their own power, kissing rings to protect their wealth, defending their turf from endless government actions, creating self-glorifying ads that miss the point entirely, and throwing tin-eared parties for themselves all along the way. I’ll give myself a win here, though I’ll also admit it was a hard one to pin down.
Fediverse Rising. For my fourth prediction I held that the protocol-driven “fediverse” would have a good year. This played out, both through the rise of Threads throughout the year (now at more than 100mm DAUs, and 275mm MAUs), and the late surge of interest in Bluesky, which is based on a similar federated approach. It didn’t hurt that sentiment around X plummeted, and many social media players began moving off TikTok for fear of a government ban currently slated for late January. Overall, I’d grade this one a win.
Apple Gets Bitten. I predicted Apple would spend the year dealing with its inherent growth issues, adding that the company would come to be understood as a major player in the advertising business, which would hurt its self-proclaimed status as a privacy champion. That’s exactly what happened in the Spring, when the size of Google’s payments to Apple came to light as part of the DOJ’s antitrust suit against the search giant. Apple also had a miserable year when it came to new product releases: The Vision Pro failed to impress (and sold far fewer units than predicted), Apple released an absolutely tone-deaf ad for its new iPad, and its “Intelligence” product launched to less than stellar reviews. So yes, Apple did get bitten in 2024, but as I also predicted, the company’s stock was still up and to the right. For now, anyway.
Bright Spots Emerge in Media. I know, it was mostly doom and gloom in media again this year. But not if you’re tracking new approaches to the media game – and there were plenty of them, if you looked hard enough. First off, of course, is the rise of “creators” and “influencers” – a recent Pew study found that one in five Americans now get their news from influencers, and that figure rises to 37 percent for those under 30. Add in AI-driven aggregation apps (Particle, Bulletin et al), the continued rise of newsletter platforms like Substack and beehiiv, the rush to Bluesky – one might make the case that media was starting to look interesting again in 2024. And hey, DOC launched too! But to be honest, I didn’t find enough “bright spots” to confidently claim this prediction as a win. I’ll take a push here.
Cars Will Keep Their Drivers. OK, one could argue that since Waymo rolled out in San Francisco and several other cities this past year, I was utterly wrong when I wrote “even if driverless tech was ready for prime time, municipalities – whose approvals matter more than state and federal governments – are decidedly not.” Then again, a limited roll out in a handful of cities does not make 2024 “the year of the driverless car.” But, I know when I’m wrong, and I’ll grade this prediction a fail.
Enterprise Data Moves Beyond Marketing. Nope – at least not in a way that anyone can explain. While it’s true that the entire corporate world is in a tizzy about data-driven AI models that will change….everything, I’m not seeing much proof out there, at least not yet. I wrote that “this coming year we’ll see at least a few touchstone examples of data-driven applications from enterprise players that change the way B2B leaders consider justifying their investments in IT. And for once, it won’t be to make a marketing campaign more efficient.” I sense this is happening, but I just don’t have the examples to show it. I’d love to hear about examples that prove me right, but…I don’t have any to grade myself as anything other than a push.
TheNew York Times Loses Its Suit Against AI. A clear miss, because the suit is ongoing, though it certainly looks like the Times is on the wrong side of this from an industry perspective (more and more media companies are closing their eyes, hoping for the best, and taking the money).
Well, that’s the scorecard: Of nine predictions, five wins, two pushes, and two misses. Not bad, but also not my best year either. Next week I’ll publish my 2025 predictions – look for hot takes on AI agents, whether TikTok will actually be banned, and Big Tech’s banner year. Until then, thanks as always for reading, and have a wonderful holiday season.
It’s been quiet here for a few months. Yesterday I posted a longish piece on LinkedIn explaining why, and for those of you wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I figured I’d repost it here….
