Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.
The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.
But that instability was always there.
This is the transcript of a fantastic talk called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.”
Absorb every word!
The rise of dot-com companies was pitched as a no consequences gold rush. We were on the precipice of a fictional future where everyone would be cashing in on the web. The reality was quite a bit more slow, and boring. Business on the web consolidated, as we now know, and left most people holding the bag. There’s no knowing exactly what will happen with AI technologies, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something far more boring and centralized than what’s being promised.
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.
A very even-handed take.
I’m glad that I took the time to experiment with AI tools, both because I understand them better and because I have found them to be useful in my day-to-day life. But even as someone who has used them and found them helpful, it’s remarkable to see the gap between what they can do and what their promoters promise they will someday be able to do. The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.
Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on the Waldsterben of the internet:
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.
I don’t believe the greatest societal risk is that a sentient artificial intelligence is going to kill us all. I think our undoing is simpler than that. I think that most of our lives are going to be shorter and more miserable than they could have been, thanks to the unchecked greed that’s fed this rally. (Okay, this and crypto.)
I like this analogy:
AI is like a dancing bear. This was a profitable sideshow dating back to the middle ages: all it takes is a bear, some time, and a complete lack of ethics. Today, our carnival barkers are the AI startups and their CEOs. They’re trying to convince you that if they can show you a bear that can dance, then you’ll believe it can draw, write coherent sentences, and help you with your app’s marketing strategy.
Part of the curiosity of a dancing bear is the implicit risk that it’ll remember at some point that it’s a bear, and maul whoever is nearby. The fear is a selling point. Likewise, some AI vendors have even learned that the product is more compelling if it’s perceived as dangerous. It’s common for AI startup execs to say things like, “of course there’s a real risk that an army of dancing bears will eventually kill us all. Anyway, here’s what we’re working on…” How brave of them.
The EU is not the FCC. I wish every American tech pundit would read and digest this explainer before writing their thinkpieces.
It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US.
It seems to me that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the way readers interact with books and the way the hack-your-brain tech community does. A wide swath of the ruling class sees books as data-intake vehicles for optimizing knowledge rather than, you know, things to intellectually engage with.
In a world where tech billionaires dominate so much of our culture, it’s troubling to see books treated like mere vessels for self-betterment the way that cold-water therapy and Fitbits are. Some of us enjoy fiction.
Ever wondered why you’re always being encouraged to download the app?
But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.
I understand that OpenAI/Microsoft can’t build ChatGPT within our legal framework. Well they could but it would be prohibitively expensive (it already is now without paying the people who did the work). But I missed the part where that is our problem as a society.
This!
I am tired of talking about these things as tech issues. They are not. They are social and political.
I agree with everything that Matt says here. Evangelising accessibility by extolling the business benefits might be a good strategy for dealing with psychopaths, but it’s a lousy way to convince most humans.
The moment you frame the case for any kind of inclusion or equity around the money an organization stands to gain (or save), you have already lost. What you have done is turn a moral case, one where you have the high ground, into an economic one, where, unless you have an MBA in your pocket, you are hopelessly out of your depth.
If you win a business-case argument, the users you wanted to benefit are no longer your north star. It’s money.
There are a lot of astute observations in here.
This rings true to me.
Google has a serious AI problem. That problem isn’t “how to integrate AI into Google products?” That problem is “how to exclude AI-generated nonsense from Google products?”
Baldur has new book coming out:
The Intelligence Illusion is an exhaustively researched guide to the business risks of Generative AI.
Design Thinking didn’t change business at all, rather it changed Design into business, adopting its language, priorities and techniques. It sold out Design in an attempt to impress those in power, and in so doing lost its heart.
I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has.
A very even-handed and level-headed assessment by Laurie, who has far more patience than me when it comes to this shit.