Rage Against the Dying of the Business Model

Well over a decade ago, I was sitting in a meeting room, idly sifting through Facebook on my BlackBerry Pearl. A decade later, I'm permanently banned from Facebook, BlackBerry is a patent zombie, and the "pearl" is no longer a user interface option. The topic was "Big Data," and the potential value buried in the company's terabytes of poorly structured and clumsily stored historical data.

I always got in trouble for failing to pay attention during those executive meetings, and I was getting myself into more trouble. They needed me to be paying attention because the onus would be on me to actually figure out how to translate these cobwebbed and crusty sql tables into big money. I actually had a really good idea for them, a "low hanging fruit" which would achieve immediate gains, and a PowerPoint (we still used that) to lay it all out.

My idea was to map every single historical damage incident onto the technicians' maps. Contrary to popular belief in the industry, damage incidents aren't all that random and aren't entirely the fault of technicians being asses. There are predictable patterns with damages, with underground utilities that are laid out in counter-intuitive ways that invite mistakes in certain places, ...which is why damages quite often occur in nearby clusters.

I was excited about the idea, because it's one that digs us deeper into our territory, allowing us to be more profitable in areas where we had been the longest, affording us an edge over any encroaching competitors. It essentially emulates an experienced technician who's familiar with the area and knows from memory that the lines in the Rosewood Subdivision are "all screwy." The simple and straightforward idea basically augmented the intelligence of the technicians, and that's where technology wins, when it works with (rather than attempting to replace) human intelligence and intuition.

There remains more computing power in your random hillbilly dive bar or inner city night club dance floor than in all of Google's supercomputer warehouses combined, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Where technology wins is when it does what it's good at to facilitate what we humans are good at.

Alas, my presentation didn't impress. One of the quality guys, a cheerful Six Sigma Black Belt who was a master of the latest corporate buzzwords, campaigns, and industry trends, was crestfallen. He sighed, then lamented, "Well, we were kind of thinking more along the lines of 'Artificial Intelligence.' You know, with the Business Intelligence prediction features that the Microsoft Rep was talking about at the conference.

"I wasn't at the conference." I flatly refused to go to the Vegas conferences, and continue to promote a conspiracy theory that the major technology corporations have a hustle going on where they get tech losers laid at tacky resorts in exchange for the losers insisting on absurdly expensive licensing contracts. It may or may not be the case. I never went to the "retreats" and "conferences." Whatever is going on, I know that the promise of AI far outstripped the actual results, and continues to do so.

On my smartphone, I try to look up stuff in Paoli and half the time it loads options for Paoli, Pennsylvania or Paoli, Oklahoma. Between the historical, search, email, and geolocation data at Google's disposal, the fact that it can't quite seem to figure out which Paoli I'm probably talking about is damning. And these are the people who insist that AI will soon be driving all of our cars and performing all of our jobs. God help us.

Google knows that AI is fool's gold, but Wall Street does not. Facebook and Google both know that they're essentially advertising companies which parasitically rely on the original content produced by folks wrapped up in their network effect. Network Effect isn't unstoppable, as MySpace Tom would gladly let Zuckerberg know. Zuckerberg already knows. They all know how fragile their monopolies actually are, but Wall Street doesn't. As long as Wall Street can and will smile and clap along with their promise to achieve some sort of profit wizardry from invading the privacy of their users (above and beyond the ad targeting they've been doing for decades), they can continue justifying their absurd capitalization.

It can be boiled down to a simple question: Will the added value of Artificial Intelligence wrought from invading privacy prove more tempting to content creators and their audiences than the privacy and anti-censorship protection offered by emergent AltTech platforms? There's little evidence that AI will be to achieve any but the most marginal added value for people, and one of the greatest market bubbles in history depends on that dubious proposition being true.

Big Tech can't come out and admit that they're out of ideas. No industry admits that they're heading toward becoming commodities with shrinking profit margins. The television industry insists that its greatest profits are still to come. The radio industry insists that HD and other nifty offerings are going to bring people back. The beauty of the Artificial Intelligence "idea" is that it's the world's greatest copout, claiming that your idea is to create a machine which generates profitable ideas.

I'm not claiming that AI is philosophically incapable of being as smart and creative as a human. I have no special insight into that Big Question. But I am claiming that we're not there yet. And the future of technology lies in decentralization, privacy, and devolution of content and control to the user and the user's organic social and professional networks. Big Tech is raging against the dying of the business model, and they'll keep wasting investor cash on trying to build a machine smart enough to reverse the decline and fall of the 21st century's digital oligarchs.