AI’s Future Is A Long Drawn-out War, And This Is Just The First Battle
Don’t you just love how the internet connected us all? How we just log on with our thumbs, faces, hold metaphorical hands with all our friends and foes we’ve never met, including stranGer74987 and mrBellyButtonOfKnowledge64, and sing our collective Kumbaya? It’s the future, in the present. The world has changed forever and we’re all witnessing it. Big statements. Even bigger lies. All packaged up as news and facts. It’s not even sensationalism anymore. At least that grew out of a seed of truth, albeit genetically modified with intense imagination. What we’re witnessing today is far beyond that — it’s legitimised insanity.
As a technologist, one has to keep an eye out for changes in tech, and an ear on the ground for potential new trends. While AI has been covered incessantly over the last few months on Medium and elsewhere on the web, both in traditional and alternative media, I mostly stayed away. For good reason — I don’t think there’s much to talk about. Yet. That’s not to say that I am dismissing it, or considering it a useless toy that people will get tired of quickly. That is unlikely to be the case, but as it stands, both AI and our understanding of it, is in its infancy, and as we all know, infancy does not guarantee maturity. Not even in tech. Especially not in tech.
If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t bet on AI just yet. But nor would I bet against it.
But then again, when it comes to tech, I am both very imaginative and conservative. Just like I don’t see electric or even self-driving cars as being innovative, I am not easily impressed by AI either. That includes Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing presentation. I equally wasn’t alarmed by Google’s public failure to get a correct answer out of its own AI, called Bard. If anything, it showed exactly what every other AI proved so far, that it’s at the very least as flawed as humans, and fact-checking and research are not going anywhere.
It seems, however, that I have become over the years part of a smaller group of technology enthusiasts, who at least try not to overreact to everything. If you’ve been spending any time on social media, that includes LinkedIn and YouTube, you may have noticed the many voices are now calling Google dead and, full of schadenfreude, preparing to attend its wake.
As much as I dislike Google for the endless reasons there are, like non-existent customer support, poor technology choices, the less than ethical methods of harvesting customer data, this same company also took us further than Microsoft and from a software development perspective I would even claim, contributed more to the world than Apple and Microsoft combined. Sure, their abandonware catalog is as endless as Emily’s list of hideous outfits in Emily in Paris, and that’s something I am actually worried about. Speaking for every heterosexual guy, Emily Collins needs to get off that show. It will box her into Netflix rubbish, and she is far better than to settle for that.
On Google, however, my stance is diametrically opposite. Checking the stocks on Yahoo.com — another company people call “dead” — its stock price is not worse than it was precisely two years ago in 2021. In September 2004, its share value was $3.24, and in February 2023, it’s still around $95. In 2004, it was already influential enough that its value was fairly obvious to everyone, and as far as web searches go, that’s still the case. The average user is not about to Bing anything, and also doesn’t care about installing Edge, and this is not something that tech enthusiast will understand, as most of them simply think the world is according to them.
As rudimentary and boring search results may look to us, they are one of the few truly genius ideas any tech company had since the dawn of the web. Combined with SEO, it created a climate where people wanted to work with Google, rather than against it. The same cannot be said about AI. The moment AI parses content and does not give back something that someone else profits from, like me from you reading this article, its value proposition becomes one-sided and only lines the pockets of those licensing out the tech or integrating it.
Let me put it simply. Why would anyone contribute to the web, if they got nothing out of it? Even Wikipedia needs money to run.
What far too few realise, is that first of all, this war is not between Microsoft and Google. Nor is it between their browsers or their equally infant AI. This is merely a small battle, and potentially quite insignificant in the large scheme of things. This is going to be a very long and painful war between content creators, platforms, and AI. The likes of Bard and ChatGPT currently are only capable of doing one thing and one thing only — regurgitate in some shape or form information that they were able to get access to. But when that leads to no clicks on various platforms, when content creators will start hiding everything behind paywalls to prevent valuable information reaching AI’s tentacles, that’s when these so-called “innovations” will feel the real pushback from humans.
Let’s not kid ourselves here. The World Wide Web is only popular because we can make money on it.
If AI integrated browsers and search engines do nothing to keep the discoverability of paid content on the web intact, or perhaps improve it, my prophetic word is, it will be the most excruciating uphill battle tech has ever faced, and the chances of failure will be higher than my attempt to take Emily Collins on a date.
So, no, I am not worried about Google keeling over, or Danny Miller’s Icarus Paradox being particularly applicable in this case. While there are plenty of very healthy thoughts expressed in his now decades-old book, it is far too premature and overconfident to make any kind of assessment about Google’s future. Saying “Goodbye Google” is like breaking up after the first fight — immature.
People seem to forget that AI models and datasets are very easy to poison, and they 100% depend on the data actually being available to them to continuously train themselves. The assumption that the world will just provide access to anything AI wants to make use of, is puerile, to say the least. It ignores key realities around how the world, humans, and capitalism work.
The war has barely begun, and this is but the beginning of the very first battle. No betting advised at this time. No “funerals” on the horizon either.
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe and/or become a member for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
