Browsed by
Category: Distruption

The Demise of Internet 1.0

The Demise of Internet 1.0

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Johnson Martin from Pixabay

Some strange things are going on in tech these days, and we wonder if, with the advent of AI, tech has lost its way.

Or is taking a different direction. Here are some seemingly unrelated events that all seem to be headed in the same direction…

First, Sam Altman approached Scarlett Johansson to be the voice of his AI, Sky, although she turned him down. “Sky drew widespread attention for its striking similarity to Johansson, particularly her role as an AI voice assistant in the movie Her,” Forbes reported. “‘OpenAI itself has acknowledged the vocal similarities between Sky and Johansson but stressed the voice “is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson” and belongs to “a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.”
Still, they did remove the voice from the ChatGPT4o model. Read More...

Barreling Towards The Terminator Trifecta

Barreling Towards The Terminator Trifecta

Comments 0 Comment

 With summer just a few weeks away, the lists of summer movies are starting to appear. Entertainment talk lately has turned to whether or not James Cameron (The Terminator, Avatar, Titanic et al) will make yet another Terminator movie and what does this have to do with tech? Read on.

The movie, if you will recall, is about a future where sentient robots have taken over the world. Their goal: eradicate humanity. It was science fiction, but how often do these films turn out to be prescient? (How a movie predicted Ohio’s toxic derailment)

We can also tell you on fairly good authority that another Terminator movie is in the serious discussion stages, especially since we seem to be at least close to Skynet going live – the last part of The Terminator tech trifecta. Read More...

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

AI’s Achilles Heel You Hadn’t Considered

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay

Those of us who work in technology – which is most of us here – can’t help but glom onto or at least test the shiny new thing that comes along. It’s in our DNA. The problem is that tech tends to jump in feet first without realizing the possible consequences, dystopian side, or even fully examining the product.

Apologies if we sound a bit repetitive here, but read on. We do have a point to make, that no one else seems to be considering.

BuzzFeed To Use ChatGPT’s AI For Content Creation, Stock Up 200%+ (forbes.com). Okay, it’s ‘BuzzFeed’ which is ‘clickbait’ by any other name.  As Forbes further reported, “Investigative reports on The Byte shared that media website CNET was using AI technology, under articles penned by the anonymous “CNET Money Staff”. The AI was created by CNET resources, and only used for a very small number of posts before human oversight detected significant misstatements of facts, errors and plagiarized content, according to multiple news sources.” The result: CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy. Read More...

Elon Musk and the Battle for Twitter Explained

Elon Musk and the Battle for Twitter Explained

Comments 0 Comment
Image by Iván Jesus Rojas from Pixabay

You gotta love Elon Musk, whether you’re a fan or not. Or at least give him the fist bump of respect for his – going there – elan. No one has that flair for shaking up the tech landscape quite like him, and one never quite knows what his next move will be, or why.

So, what’s with Musk’s focus on Twitter, be it as a majority shareholder or actual owner? At the end of the day, does it really matter?  Forest through the trees: every tech cabalist owns a media outlet: Apple has Apple News and Apple TV; Google has Google and YouTube, Meta has Facebook and Instagram; Amazon has The Washington Post. With Twitter, power influencer Musk now has his. Period.

The Twitterverse has gone wild since Musk announced his takeover plans, especially Twitter employees. OMG! He’s threatening to restore freedom of speech! Can you imagine??? Yet, “Several employees noted in internal messages that Musk, who considers himself to be a champion of free speech, has appeared to express disdain for the use of gender pronouns,” The Washington Post reported. Or is controversy the tool he uses to shine a light on hypocrisy? Hmmm…. Read More...

Is the Long Arm of Silicon Valley Being Cut Off at the Knees?

Is the Long Arm of Silicon Valley Being Cut Off at the Knees?

Comments 1 comment
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

f you’ve been following what’s been going on lately in tech and focusing on the headlines, you might have missed the forest through the trees.

Silicon Valley Disruption Part 1:

Facebook just lost half a million users, the headlines screamed (out of nearly 2B, and no bigs, you’d think, but a) they’re not growing, b) those users are in the US: prime market, which meant they took a big hit on their profits and c) it’s the first time ever that FB lost users), and the stock was devalued 20%, wiping  $200BN off the value of parent-firm Meta. Of course, founder  Mark Zuckerberg was quick to come up with the excuses, par usual (ever notice that it’s never his bad?): Read More...

Basecamp: Corporate Responsibility’s New Normal?

Basecamp: Corporate Responsibility’s New Normal?

Comments 0 Comment

Basecamp touched off a firestorm on social media and in the tech press recently when co-founder Jason Fried announced six “directional changes” to company policies, including “No more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account…People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore.”

According to The Verge, it all began due to a list of names. “Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives began keeping a list of names that they found funny… Many of the names were of American or European origin. But others were Asian, or African, and eventually the list — titled “Best Names Ever” — began to make people uncomfortable. What once had felt like an innocent way to blow off steam, amid the ongoing cultural reckoning over speech and corporate responsibility, increasingly looked inappropriate, and often racist.”

When Fried interceded with his announcement, the Twitterverse exploded, as did the online press (“Basecamp sees mass employee exodus after CEO bans political discussions,”said Tech Crunch), although Fried did not ban political discussions: he merely banned them at work. Read More...

The Video Revolution in the Age of Remote

The Video Revolution in the Age of Remote

Comments 0 Comment

While we are well aware of the fact that people have been untethering from television for quite some time, viewership has also been plummeting when it comes to the various mainstream news services. The numbers are in a free fall.

While the term ‘fake news’ has been bandied about ad nauseam and has become so much part of the patois that social media also affixes ‘potential fake news’ labels on tweets and posts that are not in lockstep with the media talking points. But no matter what’s reported, note to self: who can’t grab a photo or video with their phone these days? What the media reports, thanks in no small part to editing and green screen, and what onlookers post can sometimes seem like alternate realities and given this, even the major news outlets no longer have a monopoly over the message.

Publications are no longer necessarily authentic in their reporting, either. Prior to the last election, we’d do our usual perusal of tech articles, and noticed that the reporters always added a political aside which would have nothing to do with the story itself or the technology that was being featured. We began unsubscribing: How could we trust a reporter who was writing about, say, a dating app, then slipped in, say, a climate change aside, which had nothing at all to do with said app? The trust was gone.  So long, and thanks for all the fish. Read More...

Build Back Different

Build Back Different

Comments 0 Comment

We’ve mentioned Clubhouse before and attention must be paid: it proved to be a game-changer – big time – the likes of which we haven’t seen in a while. Clubhouse has taken social media into a different direction. While Twitter and even Facebook have been something of town squares, CH is not that: it’s the corner pub or sort of unconference  or coffee klatch, where people can wander in and out of ‘rooms,’ at will, and participate, or simply listen and learn.

Although, CH members, take note: Clubhouse Users’ Raw Audio May Be Exposed to Chinese Partner.

So, what’s next? Well, the Twitter and Facebook knock offs, of course. Considering that both platforms are losing users and revenue (Twitter reports $1.14B net loss for 2020 – and that was before CH hit the zeitgeist in a significant way, and Facebook has been hemorrhaging users in its most valuable markets for some time now, what to speak of the face that Apple Privacy Change May Cost Facebook, Google $25 Billion Over Next 12 Months), they still believe that they will forever hold sway as the Masters of the Universe, so why innovate when you can appropriate? Read More...

Post-Covid Tech: The Tipping Points and the Breaking Point

Post-Covid Tech: The Tipping Points and the Breaking Point

Comments 0 Comment

Om Malik did an excellent piece recently entitled The Inevitable has happened. And in a hurry, on fairly recent past crises and the opportunity zones that they created for technology. Head’s up, people: take note of this current crisis, especially since we’re still in medias res and observing first-hand where the shortfalls are. Case in point: The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020.

It’s not tech,but it’s there. Read More...

The 20-Teens Were the Decade of the Unicorn. Let’s Look at the Ugly.

The 20-Teens Were the Decade of the Unicorn. Let’s Look at the Ugly.

Comments 0 Comment
Real unicorns were pretty ugly, too

The final few weeks of any year – what to speak of a decade – tend to give us pause to reflect on, in the words of Alexander Graham Bell, “What hath God wrought?”

We realize that, in terms of historic industries and major industrial transitions, tech is relatively new to the planet. Every major industrial shift prior to tech has done precisely what tech has done: basically, created efficiencies. But given the breadth, scope and speed at which tech has engulfed the global landscape, forgiving founders for their youthful business missteps has tended to create those efficiencies at great expense to some, and in many cases, quite a few members of the planet’s population.

Uber entered the ride-hailing space without consideration to local regulations (Ask forgiveness, not permission) and scaled quickly, following yet another tenet of technology: move fast and break things. Uber did make ride-hailing more convenient and, surge pricing aside, less expensive. However, their drivers were not all properly vetted, which led to, in several cases, criminal allegations. But Uber skated a fine line, insisting that it is an ‘app,’ and that their drivers were not employees – the same argument they made in order to avoid paying drivers employee benefits. Job creation? Uber did contribute to the swelling underclass: the money mostly went in one direction. The Next Web summed it up pretty well back in 2017: Uber: The good, the bad, and the really, really ugly. Given Uber’s (current) legal challenges around the world, it seems to be going to the lawyers. Read More...