One Fateful Phone Call: How I Ended Up At Wired

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.

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The Trouble With Bees

This is not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future – most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs – don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

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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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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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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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