Technology is More Irrelevant Than Ever

Image: The New York Times

Drowning in Automated Slop

Urban light is now so cheap and so abundant that many consider it to be a pollutant. The same could be said about AI.

The "superbloom" in artificial intelligence isn't today's story.

This is the one the media love to tell, where the world is buying into the Silicon Valley Myth that we are now standing at the moment of The Great Fork, between the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time, trying to navigate the emergence of Good AI versus Evil AI. And, even more ridiculously, whether human beings even have a role to play in the future of humanity.

This is the one where Bill Gates tells Jimmy Fallon:

Over the next decade, advances in artificial intelligence will mean that humans will no longer be needed “for most things” in the world.

At the moment, expertise remains “rare,” Gates explained, pointing to human specialists we still rely on in many fields, including “a great doctor” or “a great teacher.” But “with AI, over the next decade, that will become free, commonplace — great medical advice, great tutoring,” Gates said.

In other words, the world is entering a new era of what Gates called “free intelligence” in an interview last month with Harvard University professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks. The result will be rapid advances in AI-powered technologies that are accessible and touch nearly every aspect of our lives, from improved medicines and diagnoses to widely available AI tutors and virtual assistants.

“It’s very profound and even a little bit scary — because it’s happening very quickly, and there is no upper bound,” Gates told Brooks.

Here’s another way to think about that boundless utopia of profound boredom and infinite distraction:

When everyone has access to the same amazing technologies, and everyone deploys the same amazing technologies the same amazing way, you get a sea of sameness on an amazing scale.

Technology breeds competitive convergence.

In recent years, a consensus has formed that the internet, as a place to live, work, shop and communicate, has fundamentally got worse, writes Jacob Silverman in an essay this week for the Financial Times (Welcome to Slop World: How the Hostile Internet is Driving Us Crazy). “You might have felt it too. Between intrusive adtech, slow websites, balky apps, crypto scams and the seeming abandonment of user-friendly design, managing one’s digital affairs has become rife with frustration, wrong turns and unreliable information. It’s become nigh impossible to complete a simple task or find a single kernel of factual information without first fighting through a thicket of distractions, sales pitches, coercive algorithms and authentication schemes to prove you are the human you claim to be. It’s exhausting and more than a little maddening.”

“Navigating the chaos exacts its own toll.

It breeds mistrust and inefficiency, a slowdown in the smooth movement of things as we find ourselves crossing the digital street to avoid another obstacle. It reduces attempts at genuine communication to a mere yelling into the void. We are faced, now, with a digital world defined by madness and hostility.”

Today’s technology story has become its own sort of atomized and automated cliché. There’s just so much slop that at a certain point it makes the internet basically useless. We’ve reached that point (more Blue Spoon thinking here: How to Sell AI in the Kingdom of the Bored).

Today's real story -- the story behind all other stories -- isn’t about technical potential. It’s about approaching strategy and innovation at a system level. This is a high spot in a new world, where the concept of "enterprise wide" extends beyond the boundaries of any one organization. Where procurement gets a seat at the strategy-making table. Where advantage goes to the side with the skills to buy, and progressively integrate, an infinite, and infinitely-expanding, universe of humanity-saving technology vendors.

Like Microsoft.

Technology-led visions are the short road to parity; just ask ‘cheap and abundant’ software engineers from stagnant HCLTech or Wipro or Cognizant or Infosys or Tata Consultancy Services. Last week, the market value of this set of big information technology services tumbled up to six percent, dragged lower by Wipro’s disappointing earnings and downbeat revenue outlook for the April-to-June quarter, triggering a broad selloff across the sector.

Nesrine Malik yesterday in the Guardian:

This torrent of AI content leads to the desensitisation and overwhelming of visual palates. The overall effect of being exposed to AI images all the time, from the nonsensical to the soothing to the ideological, is that everything begins to land in a different way. In the real world, US politicians post outside prison cages of deportees. Students at US universities are ambushed in the street and spirited away. People in Gaza are burned alive. These pictures and videos join an infinite stream of others that violate physical and moral laws. The result is profound disorientation. You can’t believe your eyes, but also what can you believe if not your eyes? Everything starts to feel both too real and entirely unreal.

Combine that with the necessary provocative brevity of the attention economy and you have a grand circus of excess. Even when content is deeply serious, it is presented as entertainment or, as an intermission, in a sort of visual elevator music.

Technological Overestimation

With exponentially increasing AI capability, we can no longer cut off a tiny piece of the world, put it in a box, and then give it to a robot. Helping people means working in the real world, where you have to actually interact with human beings.

In other words, people aren’t an afterthought.

The hard thing today is positioning novel objectives, not finding the technical potential to reach them. The Big Job to be done is market + government collaborating as the executive producers of new strategy stories, “screenwriters” to spark a different cycle of computation, where the roadmap starts and sustains a flow of competing economic systems (“ecosystem-centered market strategy”).

Gates' messaging only proves the maxim: trouble starts when means conquer ends.

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/ jgs

John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry ecosystems.