You can’t swing a cat these days without hitting a prediction of what AI means for humanity. Insofar as it’s possible for someone writing for a wide audience, I’ll share what amounts to some half-baked thoughts that I keep coming back to.
“YOU GET A UI, YOU GET A UI”
I say this as someone who feels some dissonance building an analytics product with charts and tables. The future is just APIs talking to each other. In the future, Zillow’s UI is a mere suggestion. You want the data in a different format? You want inference beyond what Zillow decided goes into a Zestimate? All of that is getting cheaper and accessible to non-technical people.
You’ll go to a site. Maybe. Instead it wil be Siri or Jarvis or Alexa or whatever “I want to see XYZ” and your client-side listener will construct it but it’s going to need access to API that has the data. The data is increasingly all the value while rigid presentations become pointless.
Again, the future is APIs talking to each other. Data becomes increasingly locked down.
On Data Lockdown…
Scarce or exclusive data’s value increases as its complement, inference, gets cheaper. The big futures and stock exchanges are some of the original 2-sided platform businesses. Can see them flexing their quasi-monopolistic might on the data side.
…which might get dark
The fight over data will intensify as well. If you place a bid, the exchange claims that’s their data. But is it yours? Well, it’s of little value to you but whose gonna galvanize the white-collar movement around “hey AI trained on all this data that had little value in isolation, but so much value in aggregate then used it to disrupt US”. It started with the Hollywood writers guilds, but is it crazy to imagine rolling protests as automation eviscerates industry by industry? To see picketers with dystopian slogans like “my data, my choice”.
It’s a different argument than p(doom) objections to AI. It’s not “you shouldn’t have built this” but you had no right to cut me out. It seemed like a bargain when we got “free” email or “free” social media. The tone deaf tech mogul will undoubtedly claim it was fair at the time and maybe that can fly intellectually. But it’s not the clawback by court that will decide. That one happens by pitchfork.
AI Immune
As SaaS gets wrecked, we wonder retains value in the singularity. My working model is:
trust and accountability
Maybe AI can sell my house but realtors have survived fee compression and technology far longer than anyone expects. I think this hints at a still-valid truth. People want to have someone to yell at, appeal to, or simply talk to when it comes to lumpy, rarely repeated transactions.
It’s the “shit umbrellas” theory. The human’s value is not in doing the work but in retaining liability. AI can read the tax code, but my accountant will stand by his work in court.
If you travel extensively for work your relationships are hard-earned. The proof of work is miles traveled or other exclusionary behavior where there was no substitute. Relationships are repos of accumulated, unfakeable work.
The more you can position yourself as accountable the more value you can retain. Being trustworthy and reliable don’t go out of fashion. They will get even more valuable as so much else can be faked.
A strange corollary to this:
Things that were always fake but valuable will stay that way. Like astrology.
A final thought in this thread:
Anyone burning their reputation to the ground thinks either the world is ending or the tides won’t ever turn. Hmm, how would you act if you couldn’t afford for the tides to ever turn?
Art
Art is a big question. There’s will always be a positional scarcity component of it and there will always be genius. The question of whether there will be a surplus of robot genius around as well. We may finally get an answer to would a million monkeys write Shakespeare.
Live performance and sports will stay important. At least until everyone over the age of 10 today is dead. Then all bets are off. I never thought watching people play video games would be popular. I’m now open to the possibility that future people may perfectly prefer robots playing video games or anything for that matter over people playing.
I leave you with this interview with the creator of Open Claw. Listen specifically from 8:30 to 10:17
107 seconds and I quote, “Holy fuck”
If you are hanging your hat on cleverness for its own sake or rigid definitions of intelligence, your time is over. I’m not saying intelligence is losing value, but that its truest definition will become obvious — the ability to get what you want out of life. This is the only definition that will matter and the bright side of that is that its more inclusive than whatever school thinks it is.
I was at a local book fair last week where you dump as many books as you can fit into brown shopping bag for $8. It was an epic haul and a great incentive to just snag boogs that seem even remotely interesting.
I picked up this 1957 classic by C. Northcote Parkinson. I was familiar with his eponymous law, which states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
This entire book is an extraordinary, laugh-out-loud, pull-no-punches satire. Parkinson would have been an absolute master at Twitter. The law itself is satire wrapped around a specific observation. The way he formalizes the argument is pure art, even ending with an insane equation (he constructs hilarious equations throughout making the book feel like a tongue-in-cheek treatise on social physics).
Satire, notwithstanding, it sure feels like the very thing Parkinson’s Law pokes fun also holds the key to our salvation if AI just does all the work. So that’s where I am now. Placing humanity’s hope on a joke by a British naval man whose skill with the pen is such that I want to vibecode a Parkinson writing voice app.