Getting It Right
While Pearson’s stock plummets on bad news about Chegg, and the media and Wall Street continue to miss important distinctions between the two, we wish for Pearson to wave the magic wand and set this straight. Meanwhile, oh the irony of social scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) demonstrating the benefits of generative technology for the good of humankind, in call centers no less, a bastion of UI/UX mishaps that are the bane of customer service existence.
We need more positive news. Especially during a week where the “godfather” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, leaves Google warning us of its dangers and having a desire to talk more freely about the implications of good and bad that often accompany sea-changes in technology. And this is more than a sea change. It’s a brewing tsunami. One Outsell team member called Mr. Hinton’s departure “a Niels Bohr moment.” God help us.
And all this took place around the birthday of the worldwide web, this past weekend. Thank you, Tim Berners-Lee, who at 37-years-old, a researcher at a physics lab in Switzerland called CERN, had the foresight to send the technology out into the wild, to create what NPR’s article called the “great online awakening.”
I was thinking about all this as our analytic team analyzes the technology and what’s happening around it. We’ve created a market map of enabling technologies and how it’s changing our industry, wrote an overview on ChatGPT when it first emerged, and continue to analyze different announcements and the implications of them through the lens of different vertical segments and how this is affecting science, legal services, risks and finance, health, marketing, education and a host of other use cases, and the software and information services that underpin these end markets. “What is our stance?” I thought. Do we have a unified POV? And it made me think of recent blogs which are our stance.
I’ve been writing about slowing down to speed up, and FOMO driving bad decisions. While it’s easy to talk about the announcements, the soundbites, tweets, articles, and litany of noise coming at us, it’s hard to climb above the noise.
We are dealing with a powerful technology. It’s consequences and impact are unknown. It has, like other technologies, the ability to do great harm, or create great benefit. Which do we choose? Will humankind make the right decisions or the bad ones? Are we capable of getting it right? Who’s definition of right?
Like cars, or rockets, or shipping containers, this is amazing innovation that can change the course of so much. But we cannot race with breakneck speed into oblivion. Experiments? Yes, please. Open discourse about our findings? Ditto. Regulations and guardrails? A few, please. Driver’s licenses aren’t such a bad thing, are they? While we think about the ingredients in our food or the metals and asbestos that shouldn’t be in our buildings, can’t we expect understanding of the data inside our algorithms? What it is, who it came from? If you trademark a recipe, don’t you still have to list ingredients and know they are safe?
There are so many lessons and interesting parallels. Pets.com was never an internet company, but always a pet store — in a different form. Amazon always competed with Barnes & Noble and then Target, Tesco, and Walmart. Newspapers were paid for in print and should have been when they went digital. There’s a lot to learn from past innovation and we must put those lessons to good use. I can’t bear to think “what if my colleague is right?”