Tag: policy

Wait, What’s This DOC Thing You’re Doing?!

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?!”

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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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Google (And all of Tech) to News: Shove It.

There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!

Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”

On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.

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When Tech Gets Too Big To Fail

I opened my annual predictions last week by noting that the technology industry had leapfrogged finance as the most powerful political force in the business world. But the news today that Meta is all but abandoning content moderation in favor of a decidedly Trump-friendly “let them say whatever the f*ck” approach has prompted me to revise that sentiment a bit.

It’s not that Tech has overtaken Finance. It’s that Tech has…become Finance. It’s become the most rapacious, amoral, win-at-all costs industry in the world. Consider:

  • Meta not only abandoned its content moderation practices (which, in turn, will allow it to supercharge its business model), it’s also building AI engagement chatbots aimed at juicing its bottom line, hired a Trump loyalist (and proponent of violence as entertainment) to join its board, and elevated a Trump devotee as its head of policy and communications. The company has pulled out every possible stop to ensure it profits from the next four years of Trump rule.
  • The global financial system is now dominated by the stock performance of tech companies. Nine of the top 10 S&P stocks by weight are tech companies. The entire S&P 500 is, in the words of one economist, “simply NVIDIA in drag.” When this is the case, finance becomes beholden to tech; now it’s tech companies, not banks, that are “too big to fail.”
  • The CEOs or founders of OpenAI, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Ripple, Robinhood, and countless others have given large sums of money to Trump in recent weeks. It’s difficult to see this payola as anything more than bribes and down payments meant to protect Tech’s position in a new world order built on … Tech.
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Predictions 2025: Tech Takes the Power Position

Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.

This isn’t going to be a normal year.

2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.

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The Tragedy of Generative AI 

Yes, I have no patience for perfecting image prompts using AI.

Listen up, tech oligarchs; lend an ear, simpering brohanions. We’re doing this generative AI thing all wrong, and if you continue down your current path, your house of cards will fall, leaving all of us wanting, but most importantly, leaving you out of power. And given that you value power over all else, it strikes me it might be in your own self interest to consider an alternate path. 

Here’s the problem: you’ve managed to convince nearly all of us that sometime real soon, generative AI will deliver us powerful services that will automate nearly every difficult and/or deadly boring task we currently have to perform. From booking complex yet perfectly priced itineraries to delivering personalized health diagnoses that vastly outperform even the most cogent physician, your AI agents have us starstruck, bedazzled, and breath-baited.* 

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Bluesky, Twitter, and “The Open Network”

Emily Liu at Bluesky has a timely post that I’d like to respond to. (Back in the day, when blogging was a thing, we did a lot of this – someone would write a thoughtful piece, then many others would write responses. These organic, mostly high-quality “backlinks” formed the backbone of Google’s early web dominance, but I digress, somewhat, because it’s all related).

In any case, Liu’s piece, entitled “Benefits of an Open Network,” uses a series of simple metaphors to explain how Bluesky is different from other social networks. Most readers already know this, but just in case, here’s the core of it: Bluesky is an app built on an open protocol, which means Bluesky users can engage with any other app which conforms to that protocol. In other words, Bluesky lives in an open network, albeit a rather limited one at the moment. Here’s Liu:

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Don’t Repeal Section 230. Clarify It.

The 26 words that “changed the internet.” Image NYT.

(This is a column I wrote for Signal360, P&G’s companion publication for its Signal conference, which I co-produce. It’s always fraught to weigh in on this fundamental piece of Internet legislation, so I welcome your thoughts!)

It’s difficult to find anything Congress agrees on these days, but when it comes to the much-misunderstood policy known as “Section 230,” it’s unanimous: this piece of 20th-century legislation needs to be fixed. And while such a fix may be needed, it could have a significant impact on how every company goes to market. 

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Technology, Humanity, and the Existential Test

I’m still digging through some of the pieces I posted at the now defunct NewCo Shift, and found this piece, adapted from a talk I gave at the Thrival Humans X Tech conference in Pittsburgh back in September of 2018. I was alarmed by trends that I saw intensifying – a push by the tech industry to deregulate their power, the growing influence of private company algorithms on public domains, the rise of autocratic politics and “technocapitalism.” Six years later, it feels like I could give this talk again today, nearly word for word – and it’d be even more relevant. 

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Consume First, Deal with the Shit Later

https://dailymontanan.com/2021/06/12/big-bad-forest-clear-cutting-continues/

Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones) – 404 Media

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