Tag: politics

The AI Debate: Blocking Agents, Tech’s Political Mistakes, Tech as Religion, and Anthropic’s Roadshow

Screen grab from Anthropic’s road show video.

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.

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Battle Lines Are Drawn (Predictions 2026, #2)

The 1960s ain’t got nothing on today.

I concluded my post “Magic and Mayhem” with a bit of a tease about the impact of AI on our society:

There will be lots of magic this year. But there will also be plenty of carnage as previously unbreachable moats start to crumble, not only in business, but also in society at large. For more on that, stay tuned for prediction #2. 

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Grading My 2025 Predictions

Nostradamus, so predictable.

All year long I monitor my annual predictions, taking note when events either make me a fool or a sage. 2025 marked perhaps the most unpredictable and frustrating year of them all – and that’s not nothing, given I started prognosticating in 2003. But then again, I did expect an odd one – from my 2025 post: “This isn’t going to be a normal year. 2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises.”

I titled my post “Tech Takes the Power Position.” While I didn’t make that sentiment one of my specifically numbered predictions, it did provide the context for how I was thinking about the year ahead. “We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure…But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence…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.”  …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 Planet Is Warming, But Our Speech Has Chilled

Image from the AlphaEarth launch.

More than a decade ago I was working on a book about the impact of data on society. I was obsessed with a maddening and seemingly impossible idea: What if we could track every single piece of data that mattered in the world, and from that data, gain unimaginable insights that would shake us into an entirely new age – the equivalent of moving from Medieval times to the Renaissance?

Of course, I was struggling with this thesis well before AI became mainstream. I knew that the compute and algorithms needed to turn my musings into reality were on the horizon, but I simply could not find a way to realize the concepts I sensed were playing out all around me. I felt like Captain Ahab, madly chasing a spectral leviathan of data. I spent days staring out at the ocean from a rented cottage on the beach, imagining every molecule of water as information dancing across sentient processors. It was about this time that I made an uneasy peace with my ambitions to be the next Gleick or McPhee. Rather than submit to the insanity of the matrix, I abandoned the project, and it has haunted me ever since.

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If You Trust AI, You’re Asleep. (At Least You’re Not “Woke”)

Today brought so many stories worth “notes and observations” that I thought I’d try something new – a flash newsletter of sorts, with commentary on stories that pushed my eyebrows up a bit more than usual. Each of these items is worth a full-fledged long-form piece, but it’s Friday, so let’s be brief:

Do You Trust OpenAI? Over the past two years I’ve been warning that when it comes to long promised “user agents” that work on our behalf, AI companies would inevitably adopt the big tech playbook of providing centralized services that they control, ensuring that consumers are dependent on their platforms and by extension, locked into their services. This architecture is anathema to true innovation in a modern data economy, but inevitable given the capital constraints of current AI models. Well, this morning brought news of OpenAI’s “Agent,” which purports to “take over” our computers and take action on our behalf. As I’ve asked, over and over, is this the way we want the future to unfold? Who exactly do we think OpenAI’s agent really works for? Hint: It’s not us, anymore than Facebook, Amazon, or Google ended up working for us.

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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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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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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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Do We Even Have The Spine To Sacrifice, Just A Little Bit?

Thanks President Bush.

Old people are always complaining about how things were harder when they were young. Walking to school in the snow, uphill both ways, that whole thing. So forgive me as I embark on what initially might feel like that old man trope, but stay with me. I’m trying to make a larger point, and I have to start with a few stories of how things were in the Before Times.

So. Back when I was a kid, Big Things That Were Not Entirely In Our Control would happen. Presidents and Governors would get on the (usually black-and-white) TV, imploring us – all of us, mind you, every single citizen of these United States – to do something that would help alleviate the situation. The actions we were asked to take weren’t particularly terrifying – it’s not like we were getting called up to war (though the last-ever draft, for Vietnam, was still fresh in everyone’s mind.)

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