Articles in the civibus category

1. The social era is over

   I believe the endgame is that all digital communication becomes suspect. Even as some persist in broadcasting handwritten and mouthspoken words over the wire for other humans, they'll be spitting into the flood. The agentic babble will overwhelm.

   People have talked about the return of oral culture as a better fit for the digital medium or for the global audience. AI pushes it further: if I can't see your lips move in person, I can't assume there's a human speaking. Recorded speech will almost certainly be fake. The written word is right out.

   I suppose it's nice to imagine that this heralds a return to small, human sized networks. Of people knowing each other by sight. I wonder. Given the increasingly revealed preference most have for solitude, many may prefer to be left alone with their GenAI reels.

2. The kids are alright

   Social media, mobile phones, video games and now AI are among the crowning jewels of human creation. Infinite libraries of information are in everyone's pocket. Entertaining new formats for instruction and diversion are being created, not by media institutions, but by ordinary people in their spare time. Children are no longer kept apart from each other in classrooms, but have their own virtual worlds in which to create knowledge and share it.

   The response from our gerontocracy is predictable: ban it.

   As usual, Douglas Adams summed it up:

   I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

   1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
   2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
   3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

   The truth is that technology is disruptive: it changes societies. In their time, movies, books and even the bicycle all instigated widespread moral panic. Bicycles meant that for the first time, young people could easily meet friends under their own steam, the social network technology of their day.

   Today, teachers worry about children in their classrooms "addicted to their phones". So the children aren't paying attention to their lessons, but the truth is many never were. Now instead of sitting at desks like zombies, they're happily engaged in their phones because they have access to something that really interests them.

   But disruptive memes are spreading among children! Well why shouldn't children be allowed to create and disseminate knowledge among their peers? Isn't that the essence of education? Or do we think children should be passive, empty vessels into which we pour our approved ideas? If you disagree with the memes children are sharing, you should make an argument for your position, not shut down the debate.

   Children are using ChatGPT to write their essays! I'm sorry to tell you, but adults are using ChatGPT to write their emails and reports. Education needs to adapt to the reality that social media is a better way to discover new interests and YouTube is simply a better way to learn basically anything.

   There's another sinister undercurrent to the "ban social media and AI" platform. In the case of AI, big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple etc.) thought at first that AI would be a "sustaining technology" - that is, because of their ability to invest billions and hire the best engineers, mastery in AI would help to cement their monopolies. But recently, the CEOs have woken up to a growing realisation that AI might well be a "disruptive technology" - as a commodity, AI gives startup companies the ability to challenge Google in search, Facebook in social media and Apple with the idea that maybe we don't all need to use their phones. Their playbook is the same as any other industry cartel's: lobby the government to regulate their industries, because regulation raises the table stakes to enter the industry so effectively that startups become non-starters. Facebook will happily pay the governments tax to censor their social networks, as the enormous cost of doing so serves to prevent any challengers to their business.

   Note that, this isn't an argument against allowing the Chinese ownership of TikTok. I see real geopolitical reasons why we might not want our media companies in foreign hands. We have had similar legislation against foreign ownership of newspapers, for example.

   While I may not agree, it's wrong to say that there's no argument for some regulation of AI. First we should admit that most of the scare stories and scenarios presented are already illegal. Why should it be more illegal for a judge to be racially biased if the judge is using AI, for example? The call for regulations over issues already covered by existing legislation is a tell-tale sign of a monopoly campaigning for cartel protection. I'm told that, out of all AI scenarios, politicians are most worried about deepfakes, and that is a genuinely new capability that perhaps needs oversight. However, lawmakers should be aware that it may not be technically possible to ban video or audio that "sounds like Rishi Sunak". More likely, we need to adapt to a world in which all media is suspect, and learn to use technologies for proving provenance of video and audio.

   Lawmakers should be very careful of any regulation governing such a fast moving and potentially fruitful technology as AI. If we regulate it out of existence, or make it so that only Google can afford to play, we will never know what possible good we have lost: badly needed medical, educational, military and productivity gains are all to play for.

   Ban children from social media and we stultify them, lock them out of the most exciting new technological spaces and prevent them from educating themselves.

3. SEO at the end of days

   Google’s announced a GPT-4 killer, Gemini, for release by December. There’s no question that OpenAI have a massive lead, but from the outside, it doesn’t look unassailable. LLMs may have presented Google with the first real threat to their search business.

   LLMs hint at a new interface to computing. Microsoft’s strength isn’t interfaces, but sales. They can add LLM features to their software as customers need them. Apple can fall back on their hardware — and may see an increasing demand in consumer compute even as they slowly come around to updating iOS. But Google is only an interface. A single UI paradigm — search. They’ll need to move fast.

   I was talking SEO today, and the paradigm already feels outdated. People out there still discovering software through search engines like boomers with cable subscriptions.

4. LLMs are complementary

   LLMs (and generative AI generally) have an important feature: broad adoption of LLMs doesn’t require a change in consumer behaviour. LLMs are a complementary technology. We can deploy them right now to the cloud, to people’s smartphones and into enterprise software stacks.

   The iPhone’s success fostered a narrative: that swift widespread change of consumer behaviour would be inevitable if the promise was there. But in reality, the unprecedented rise of mobile was overdetermined: the hardware was finally good enough (after decades of development) at the same time that the internet was finally changing consumer behaviour (after many false starts).

   Crypto and VR proponents have been selling them as a wave of technology about to break over our heads. But adoption in their current forms requires consumers to adopt new behaviours — buying (and using) costly barely-good-enough headsets, or changing their financial arrangements. I don’t doubt that we’ll see these technologies changing people’s lives in the future, but it won’t happen until the transition becomes easier for consumers to swallow. Making Crypto and VR not worth betting your balance sheet on.

   LLMs are different. LLM-powered services can sit alongside all existing software stacks, seamlessly providing functionality that wasn’t possible before. Consumers continue using their cloud-backed web and mobile apps and as far as the customer is concerned, their software got better without them having to do anything.

   In this way, LLMs are more like the move to cloud. Cloud-powered features first showed up as options within our traditional desktop apps. “Share” or “Save to Cloud” buttons (with the floppy disk icon, naturally). Users didn’t need to know what it all meant, they could just opt-in to the new functionality alongside their existing workflows. Eventually, consumer’s came to intuit the new model, and apps changed, but it was a gradual process.

   Each technology has its own path to adoption. Growth of LLM-powered services will be smoother than cloud, as it doesn’t need big-bang digital transformations. It’s possible to re-write individual functions within an existing system to take advantage of LLMs. The tech is complementary to our current cloud, web and mobile platforms.