Tag: ai

Headless Marketing

Yesterday I wrote a piece about the AI-driven “white collar recession,” which felt to me like a bunch of bullshit marketing. This morning as I perused my morning paper I came across this extraordinary example of exactly what I’m on about. The image above is an ad in The Information’s morning tech news roundup.  It’s an undisguised appeal aimed at marketing professionals, playing directly to their fears that they’re about to be replaced by AI. The solution, of course, is … “Head” – the “world’s first AI marketer” which, the company claims, is “not a tool, it’s a new species.”

This kind of claptrap is clogging up any reasonable dialog about the role of AI in our economy. On its home page, Head claims to be “hired” by more than 50,000 companies – hey, that’s a lot! But just a bit of legwork reveals Head is … well, the word “questionable” comes to mind.

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A “White Collar Recession”? It Won’t Be AI’s Fault.

Image from “The White Collar Recession” – Salesforce

BULLSHIT!

That’s what I found myself yelling at a recent board meeting, unimpeded by my usual filters of propriety or self-restraint. But I couldn’t help myself. The board was debating whether AI was going to come for all of our jobs, and someone had just referenced an article which said it wouldn’t be long before AI was doing the work of most doctors, lawyers, and – this is where I broke – writers.

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Is AI the “Big Bang” or Merely a “Turning Point”? Much Depends on the Answer

According to scholar Carlota Perez, one of tech’s most revered theorists, society regularly goes through technology-driven “revolutions.” These structural cycles can take fifty years or more, and are defined by core technologies which shape life as we know it. Her list of previous cycles include the Industrial Revolution; The Age of Steam and Railways; The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering; and The Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production.*

Back in the early 2000s, Perez has identified the Internet (more formally, ICT, or “information communications technologies”) as the dominant technological force driving our current age. Perez’s framing has been a favorite of pundits ever since – and has played a central role in the debate as to whether a much-hyped “Next Big Thing” – crypto, the metaverse, quantum computing – is merely a feature of an ongoing revolution, or the starting gun to an entirely new age.

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How Google Can Win the Future

[Second in a series, first post here]

This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing an anti-trust case – that happened last summer. Nor was it the first ten days of Google’s ongoing search remedies trial. Instead, it was a statement just two days ago by an Apple executive, Eddie Cue, which led to an almost instantaneous panic amongst investors.

Cue told the court that consumers’ preference for using AI agents had led to a decline in search traffic inside Apple’s Safari browser (Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to secure that traffic – a major focal point of the government’s case).

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Free the Database of Intentions: Could Google Thrive If It Gives Away Its Data?

Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered, and every path taken (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the key stuff). I’ve tracked this extraordinary artifact since 2003, and have come to believe that Google’s control over it has become a inhibitor to innovation and flourishing in our society.

The US government – yes, even this one – agrees with me. In the nearly three decades since Google first launched, the company has gone from champion of the open Internet to established monopolist whose principle business is protecting its profits. With the advent of consumer AI, that principle business is imperiled. Google is protecting a revenue stream that it must understand is no longer defensible, either by law or by practice.

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How On Earth Will OpenAI Hit $129 Billion in Four Years?!

Chart The Information

I’ve been traveling for the past week, and ignoring the news as best as one can while on the road. But when The Information posted this doozy of a story – OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain – I made a note to myself: Grok those numbers, and see what on earth is going on.

By the time I got home, Ed Zitron, currently the tech world’s most fervid antagonist – had beat me to it. Zitron dissembled The Information’s reporting, noting that the piece takes “great pains to accept literally everything that OpenAI says as perfectly reasonable, if not gospel, even if said things make absolutely no sense.”

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Who Owns Your AI Identity? (Hint: Not You)

As generative AI reaches a fever pitch of investment, product releases, and hype, most of us have ignored a profound flaw as we march relentlessly toward The Next Big Thing. Our most dominant AI products and services (those from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, for example) are deployed in the cloud via a “client-server” architecture – “a computing model where resources, such as applications, data, and services, are provided by a central server, and clients request access to these resources from the server.”

Now, what’s wrong with that? Technically, nothing.  A client-server approach isn’t controversial; in fact, it’s an efficient and productive approach for a company offering data-processing products and services.  The client – that’s be you and your device – provides input (a prompt, for example) which is relayed to the server. The server takes that input, processes it, and delivers an output back to the client.

Non-controversial, right? Well, sure, if the “server” in question is a neutral platform that’s only in the business of processing your data so you can use the services it offers. Banks, for example, use neutral client-server architectures to provide online financial services, as do most health care providers. The data you share with them isn’t used for anything other than the provision of services.

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Should AI Write Our Fiction?

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.

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How Is AI Changing Search? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New data highlighted in Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter codifies what most of us have already assumed: AI chatbot usage is starting to reshape search. And when search changes, so does the Internet as we know it. Unfortunately, the data lacks a fundamental denominator, and as such, only serves to feed the signal-free hype cycle we’re currently in.

The data comes from Adobe’s Analytics platform customers, and it paints a fascinating if incomplete portrait of how consumers conduct their online research. Yes, traffic from AI chatbots has risen more than 1000% since last summer, but….on what base? Take a look at this chart:

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Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

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