Here’s an interesting bit of insight we got at Imagination in Action in Davos from Dane Knecht, an SVP at Cloudflare.
To me, it was about the struggle to properly frame AI in context, and think about the slow run up to what we have today, rather than just the exponential explosion we’re going to have, this year, next year, and after.
Now follow this: Knecht starts with a rather unusual assertion: “AI is going to disappear,” he says.
Huh? What does that mean? Well, from the rest of his remarks, you get that this is really about what we call things semantically, and how we understand our delicate dance with tech.
“Right now,” we’re all talking about AI because it feels new,” Knecht says, noting that tools like ChatGPT feel different to use: they feel revelatory, partly because of how we interact with them. On the other hand, he suggests, we have overlooked some of the earlier “AI” because we just didn’t think of it the same way.
“People have been using AI for years,” he says, giving the example of online car shopping, not to mention things like autocorrect and predictive text that now help us to write. Think about it – we’re only writing less than half of what we send, because the tech is providing the rest! As for car shopping, I’m reminded of a cool commercial from a few years ago, with a young woman directing car pictures in real-space, using gestures. Of course, in these ways, we are already deeply reliant on AI!
“AI will soon be embedded in every tool and app we use,” Knecht continues. “It will be the norm for computers that assist us. We’ll get used to more and more of such functionality. We’ll no longer think of it as AI…”
That makes sense: like so many other new technologies, a lot of this automation work will soon become, in a way, de rigueur, and it’s the not the first time I’ve heard that, either. But somehow this struck me, thinking about how overlooked networking is as a concept.
“Just as AI is disappearing … when it runs, walls will disappear,” Knecht says. “It will no longer be: “does it run on a device? does it run on a data center?” (Things) will start to be run ‘on the network’… we’re already seeing that, as devices get smaller, as chips get faster…”
This last part, this prediction that Knecht made at the end of his comments, is prescient: AI, he argues, will get embedded into the Internet.
That might be really important, because as we look at the risks, as we look at the scenarios, we wonder, in general: where will AI ‘live’? Will it be put, for example, into robots and walk among us? Or will it be more siloed?
But with all of that in mind, if AI is “loose” on the Internet, what are the ramifications? Take a look, for example, at this article from The Verge, where an old pro, James Vincent, provides this screed:
“Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects “output of 200 to 250 articles per week.” ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and “AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.” The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born.”
Ouroboros, indeed.
Something to think about. Take a look here for more on Davos.
