What Everyone Gets Wrong About the Future of AI with Nick Foster

20:14And a lot of the things that we're trying to measure now, particularly things involving humans, are just naturally chaotic. So any kind of dotted line striding confidently out into the future is the story. And we need to treat them a bit more like that.

20:26Kara Swisher:Yeah, the phrase I use is frequently wrong, but never in doubt. You know, like they're often wrong kind of stuff or else just lying. Sometimes it's just flat out lying. But so when you have a should future, it's not, again, it's not bad to imagine, but they base certainty on rather than just, we're going to just do this because we make this design choice. I'm thinking of, you know, Steve Jobs, he took things off of the computer and he took off one of the things that you put in the side and everyone lost their mind. And I said, well, why did you do this? He goes, I just didn't like it. Like, it was a great way to make a decision.

21:04Kara Swisher:He didn't like it. And he goes, I have no data. I just don't want it there. I just decided. And he goes, people can like it or not or use my products or not. I don't care. And it was kind of like, oh, all right, that makes sense. But he didn't base it on, we should keep it there because of this and that. I think that the over-reliance on data and feedback to make your decisions just becomes crippling really quickly. And it can totally freeze your product, whatever it is. Because you sort of do a little test, you get a bit of negative feedback, because people usually refer to, react to change in sort of negative ways, whatever it is.

21:37And so you don't do it. And your product just becomes ossified and stuck in ice. And sometimes you do need to make that idea that veers away from that dotted line of where the data says we're going.

21:47Kara Swisher:Or in a should thing, it was another encounter I had one time with Bill Gates when the iPod came out, the iPod. And I was showing it to him. It was starting to gain some traction. And he said, what is it? It's trivial. It's a white box with a hard drive in it. That's how he described it. It's a white box with a hard drive in it. It's trivial. And I said, if it's so easy, why didn't you think of it? Yeah. I mean, you're talking to somebody that used to work at Nokia. Yeah. So like I've been around that kind of confidence and our data says this, they'll never, the market for this, the price is too high, the whatever, you know.

22:25Yeah. And sure enough, we know, ask Blockbuster, ask Kodak, you know, these are companies that had very confident dotted lines striding off into the future.

22:33Kara Swisher:Yeah, he did the same thing with Google. What is it? A box on a white page. I was like, what's your problem with white pages and white boxes and stuff like that? And he said, it's easy. And I'm like, again, the kids seem to like it. We'll be back in a minute.

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24:04Kara Swisher:That's joindeleteme.com slash Kara code Kara. Let's talk about might futurism. It presents itself as a reasonable adult in the room. It lays out possibilities, calculates the probabilities, and you see it as think tanks, lobbyists, government agencies. When it comes to AI, we'll call for global summits, publish frameworks and voluntary guidelines. Netflix just published some around ethical AI use of it. Where could that go wrong and what do they miss? I mean, the way I define might futurism is sort of the opposite of should futurism, which is looking at the future as a huge landscape of probability and possibility.

24:45Sort of from the rand days of the Cold War, scenario planning and game theory. Like when we're playing chess, you make a move and you figure out, oh, well, we could do that and we could do that, we could do that. So it becomes this huge terrain of multiple stories. And I think on a commercial level, it probably represents best in class futures work. And if you were to hire a strategic foresight partner, that's the kind of work they would do. Ingest just tons of data and build lots of, this might happen, this might happen. We think this is more likely. We think this is less likely. So that terrain of mights about the future is what I define here.

25:17The challenges with these ways of thinking are many. The first is that no matter how much data you pull in or how many opinions or how many weak signals you draw on, you'll never have it all. Right. More importantly than that, your adversaries, particularly in things like the Cold War, they might be deliberately deploying false data to throw your scenarios off course. So the competitive nature of future scenario planning becomes a problem. And I think that's sort of where I stand with my futurism. I think, like I said, if you were to hire a company to do that kind of work, that's the kind of work that you would get.

25:50But it does sort of lack, and it has the same sort of confidence. Like, we've seen this whole terrain, and it can just get very complex very, very quickly. and not lead you to a kind of decision, just lots and lots of options.

26:01Kara Swisher:It could also lock you into constant analysis, right? Analysis, paralysis. Analysis, paralysis. And again, for every, when you just think, right, we've got the 50 scenarios in front of us, somebody will walk in and say, teens in Korea or something. You're like, oh, now we need to do another 10, you know? So it just becomes this self-perpetuating mess of potential future scenarios. Which doesn't lead you to a decision. And it makes making a decision that much harder. So finally, there's don't futurism. You call it, quote, unwelcome guests in communities built on optimism, positivity, and forward momentum.

26:35Kara Swisher:These are doomers, critics, activists. And you quote one of my favorite philosophers, Paul Virilio, who wrote, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. we definitely need some don't futurism in the AI conversation, but it can lead to the dystopian scenarios, which come rather fast and furious. So how do business leaders create space for nuance and meaningful dissent without falling into the catastrophizing? Yeah. So the fourth corner that I call don't is that place of looking to the future and the futures that you don't like or you don't want to end up in. And again, religions and science fiction cinema does a lot of work in dystopia.

27:15Religions have places like hell and purgatory to try and steer you in the present away from undesirable futures. I think we do have that in AI and in technology writ large, but it tends to be extrinsic. It tends to be from a position of critique. It doesn't happen enough within organizations. And I think we're starting to see a slight shift in that, I think, in some sectors where people are starting to understand the negative externalities of the things that they're creating. And they're starting to understand the second and third order implications of the things they're building. But I think that the challenge with don't futurism is if you spend too long in that space, or you only do it, it can become crippling, particularly for, we're seeing this a lot in our young people who have this term ambient adolescent apocalypticism, which is just being surrounded entirely by bad portrayals of the future or terrifying portrayals of the future that just become crippling.

28:07And it makes it really hard to sort of be hopeful or excited about the future.

28:11Kara Swisher:And I think at the same time, tech often never has enough. I mean, it's called consequences or adult behavior, right? That you can say, wow, if I do this, then this. And it's interesting because they tend to lack any of that. One of the things I wrote about in my book was I was in a meeting about Facebook Live. And they show it to reporters before. And I said, OK. It's always like some fun cat doing something. Like some example. In that case, it was the Chewbacca mom. Remember her? And so I said, well, what happens if someone bullies on this? What happens if someone commits suicide? What happens if someone beats someone up or uses it?

28:49Kara Swisher:Or worst case scenario, straps a GoPro on their head and starts shooting people. And the whole room looked at me and one of the tech people were like, you're a bummer. And I went, yeah, humanity's a fucking bummer. So they don't do enough of that. I think you're right. And I think part of my job when I was working inside big tech companies was to do that kind of work with people or at least try and encourage them to think about if you put this out in the world, people will use it in these ways. And you either need to mitigate that or be at least aware of it. And I think that the strange thing with AI is it feels like the public or the consumers or the real world is ahead of the technology in that regard.

29:30There is a lot of doubt and skepticism and a lot of dubious opinions about what is this and do I actually want it and I feel bad about it. And I think that the people producing these technologies have to come up to meet that. And again, as part of this sort of balance of thinking about the future from a could, should, might, and don't perspective, you need that sort of balance from all four corners.

29:50Kara Swisher:Right. So, all right. These are the four different mindsets that people bring to analyzing the possibilities around AI. Let's get to your expert question. Every episode, we have an expert send us a question for our guests. Let's hear yours. Hello, I'm Ethan Malek, a professor at Wharton and author of the book, Co-Intelligence. And my big question is that with AI, for the first time, we actually have a truly unimaginable future that seems to be the mainline forecast of the various AI labs. They think they'll build a machine smarter than a human at every intellectual task in the next five years, maybe 10 at the outside, which would have very large changes to how we work, live, do science, and everything else.

30:29Kara Swisher:So the question is, how do we start thinking about the potential for an unimaginable future when we have trouble even articulating what that is? So the question is, how do we start thinking about the potential for an unimaginable future when we have trouble even articulating what that is? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a, I mean, that's a very hard question to answer, obviously, why it's been asked. I think the challenge that we've got in articulating the future at the moment is that the present is so volatile. There's that Gibson quote that well-formed ideas about the future are difficult because we have insufficient now to stand on.

31:04And it does feel like that. And in the conversations I've been having around this book, it does feel like there's this sort of instability around us. And my argument to that is like, well, should we just stop then? I think that means we need to do more thinking about the future. And it doesn't mean to say we have to get it right, which is why I shy away from things like projections or predictions or prognostications about the future. I just think doing the work is important. Sitting people down and finding space in their daily life to have that conversation about what are we building, where is it going, what don't we know, what do we need it for, what kind of world might we leave behind.

31:39I think that that level of understanding and that level of respect for thinking about and talking about and doing work about the future just doesn't exist almost anywhere.

31:49Kara Swisher:Does that get worse with the frantic nature of the tech people in terms of spending that they're doing, the talent stuff? It seems demented at this point. And I think most regular people feel that or intuitively feel that, but always go, well, they're the rich people they must know. And I'm always like, they don't know. They don't actually know. I think you've got a strong take on this, that they're rich, but they're not geniuses. There's this sort of position. Yeah, of course. That's their talent is money. Yes, and convincing folks. Yeah. And I think that that exists and we have to be aware of that.

32:24But I think the reason I don't call myself a futurist is because I think a lot of people that do call themselves futurists or show up on stages at events and give talks, there's a lot of snake oil stuff there. Yes. And I feel uncomfortable with it, so I don't want to be part of that cohort. So I think those people's work needs to get better. And when I say better, I mean more balanced, more honest, more open, more rigorous. But I don't think that will happen naturally because the audiences don't push back enough. They don't raise their hands enough. They don't maybe feel confident enough to say, wait, hang on a second.

32:54You've been saying this for 10 years. Where is it? Or what makes you so sure in that projection?

32:59Kara Swisher:Right. I would love, the reason I wrote this book, I could have written a book for other futures practitioners or an academic book. I've written a broad appeal book because I'm actually encouraging people to say, you have a job to raise your hand and say, this isn't good enough. Tell me more. Right, or it doesn't work for me. It's meant to overwhelm and stupefy you, I think, in a lot of ways. Ethan asked about artificial general intelligence or AGI. As a designer, what features do you want to see in an AGI beyond the obvious goal of aligning it with human well-being? If AGI really does arrive, what would it need to get right about human values and behavior to actually make our lives better and not just more automated and distracted?

33:44Without wanting to get into a taxonomic hole here. Also, have you noticed how many people in Silicon Valley are now really interested in philosophy and the nature of humanity and suddenly experts on Descartes and things like this?

33:55Kara Swisher:I have. It's fascinating. They never took the courses or read the books. Sure. That does not stop them. So to that point, I'm interested in machine intelligence as opposed to artificial intelligence. And I think AGI is a sort of weird totem that sits out in the future whose definition is constantly evolving, depending on what books people have read that week or what definition or benchmark somebody's given to it. So I think it's a sort of, I don't know, fool's errand, is that the right term? To say we're aiming towards that thing. Because the question is, what is that thing? And then what happens the day after?

34:29And I think that it sort of doesn't take us anywhere useful. And I think the idea of separating machine intelligence from human or mammalian intelligence is they are fundamentally different in many ways. You know, human intelligence is bound together with experience and mortality and hormones and beliefs and all of those other things that these systems don't have. So I think treating them as their own thing allows them to stop being mimics. Synthetic is the word I would use. Synthetic, there we go.

34:57Kara Swisher:Synthetic, I think they're going for God. They're going, they are. And I have a weird theory that a lot of the people doing this right now, a lot of the most, many of them are men or most. And I have this theory that can't have children like women can, and this is their version of pregnant. Like this, think about it. I'm thinking, I don't want to think about it too much. I know, but this is it. But I also think if you say that your business is creating gods, you can register your company as a religion and therefore you become, get some good tax breaks too. Correct, exactly. And many of them are becoming more, which is really bizarre in a wide way.

35:33Kara Swisher:So let's talk about more specific about how it affects business. Because most people have to deal with it on a daily basis and overspend and spend things they don't need to or getting forced on you. And often when business people ask me, what should I do? I go, sit still. Don't do anything. And the phrase a lot of people in tech use are NPCs, which is from video games, non-playable characters in video games. You flipped that formulation on its head and said, we should think about the future. We should actually focus on NPCs, regular people, how they use technology. I think NPCs is actually a very good way because you all don't count.

36:10Kara Swisher:They're not thinking of you. So how should business approach designing AI for the average person, an NPC? Yeah, I've got a long lecture I can give on this, which I won't. But when I was a junior designer, I did a lot of the bombastic escapist sci-fi inflected futures work because I thought that's what you were supposed to do. Then I would go home to my parents' sort of damp Midlands house, go to the pub with my dad and just think, what was that I was doing in London at the weekend during the week? It doesn't make sense. And I think that it just started to not reflect my own experience of the world.

36:45And so I lent into this way of thinking that I call the future mundane, which is a way of thinking about either NPCs or background talent or extras. I think in the opera they're called supernumeraries or something. But the people that exist in the background of scenes are the people that are also going to be existing with this technology. So I love to think about technology in sort of a mass-adopted, ordinary, everyday part of people's lives. And I think that helps ground the conversations. And it helps you lean on things.

37:15Kara Swisher:Which it's not thought of, actually. It's not thought about how people are going to use it. It's just trying to sell you something before you know what you need it for. Yeah. And snake oil. We have a habit of talking about the future, again, as some other place occupied by other people, probably more heroic people than us. Whenever you see something like a future device or a new gadget or whatever, it's really helpful to start to think about it. You always see these videos of somebody using VR to fix a heart or build a city. But actually, people just watch YouTube and play games on them. They do.

37:45So think about it in somebody's backpack on a bus in a wet city. Seattle is where we are today. Like, think about it in those terms. And suddenly it grounds everything and it normalizes things and starts to say, actually, I have 100 questions now. And it stops it being a fantasy land.

38:01Kara Swisher:So does that create a situation for business people feeling enormous pressure to buy, buy, buy before they know what the actual, this is something I say, I'm like, don't buy it until you know what you want to use it for. Use it to see how it works and then ask questions. But it's often foisted on you in this inevitability. Yeah, there's the FOMO side of it, which every company feels like they need to put on their slides, like we're doing AI, we're doing AI. And I've seen a hundred people on LinkedIn put AI designer now in their bios and whatever. It feels like you have to do it. Right. And it's because we're in a sort of whatever you want to call it, a Cambrian explosion of technology or whatever.

38:34It is. I think we need to play with these things and we need to explore them in environments that we're comfortable with. Not reject them and not say no, but just play with them. Start to make sense of them and say, actually, there's something here, there that either me or my team or my company or my society or my culture could benefit from and then start to make the big investments and run towards these technologies.

38:54Kara Swisher:The trillions of dollars they're spending here is really breathtaking in many ways. Your work shows that humans are messy and designing intelligent systems that can handle a lot of things a worker doesn't it is probably very complex. Talk about what gets lost when machines replace people. I mean, that's a good one. I think there's a really weird thing going on at the moment that people look at the world as it is and think that's what it is. And then they apply AI to it as some sort of admin amphetamine. Just do what we used to do, but just faster and more efficient. But I don't think that's actually where we're going to end up.

39:29I think that's where we'll start because people see the world and they have their list of problems that they want to answer or address. And they say, oh, AI can do that in half the time or half the cost or twice as often, whatever it matters to you. The challenge for me is what new things come after that. What new jobs, what new ways of working, where creativity plays into all of this. I think that isn't what's being talked about enough. And I think we need to have that conversation.

39:52Kara Swisher:Meaning we don't know. We don't know. Right, exactly. I mean, one of the things I always say is, could you have imagined Uber when they invented the internet, when the internet started to become commercialized? No. Right. Nobody, or when the iPhone came out, could you have imagined Airbnb? Could you have imagined? Someone did. The example that I tend to use is the guitar amplifier, actually, because it takes it away from sort of Silicon Valley tech. And when the guitar amplifier was created, it was designed to reproduce the sound of a guitar or a voice louder. Obviously, what came with that was distortion, which is a bit like the artifacts we see with AI.

40:25And a lot of engineers said, that's a bad thing. We need to engineer that out. But a lot of creative people saw that and heard that and said, there's something interesting. And lo and behold, they lent into it and said, this is actually something new and it's a different thing.

40:38Kara Swisher:It wasn't trying to reproduce. And so you end up with grunge and rock and roll and heavy metal. and that birthed a whole new industry and a whole new art form. So I'm less interested in saying, we have this problem, let's throw AI on it and we can do it twice as fast with half as many people. I'm more interested in saying, the world is a place filled with people with lots of things we're trying to achieve. We have this new set of capabilities, what new things might it birth? It's also because they hate the word friction. They find friction to be offensive. They're going to make this seamless for you, whether it's AI relationships.

41:09Kara Swisher:We'll give you a seamless relationship. We'll give you one that's not a problem. We'll give you answers that are easy, that kind of thing. And I think one of the things I'm pushing back on is friction is what makes everything interesting, right? And distortion is friction. Yes. Right? So that's a really big concept because they're constantly pushing we're going to make it convenient, seamless. And I am always, anytime they do that, I'm like, you know, sex is friction. Thank you. But then I think, oh, wait, they now have chatbot girlfriends. So, well, that's the end of that. So, but you can see how easy it is to fall into the frictionless environment.

41:48Yeah, it comes from a mindset of viewing the world as a series of problems to be solved. And I've always found a problem with the term solution. We always have this, like, companies name themselves so-and-so solutions or whatever. And I think it's just, it's a very reductive way of looking at the world. So we can take something like the transition from petrol cars to electric cars and we say, you know, problem solved. Far from it. Particularly if you're a nine-year-old boy being forced down a hole in Congo to dig up lithium or cobalt for these batteries. A problem and a solution only exists as far as you're willing to look.

42:21And I think thinking about the depth of implications about all of the things that we're bringing about on the world and the second and the third order implications of the things we're bringing about on the world is where responsible companies start to flourish is actually understanding that friction and complexity is part of business. You can't just streamline something and say point A to point B. There's joy in the mess, and there's also responsibility in the mess too.

42:45Kara Swisher:So talk about the unintended consequences of rapid AI adoption. Besides getting it wrong, I'm thinking of something like expanding a highway, for example. People think more lanes will ease traffic, but research shows it actually makes it worse. So conventional wisdom says AI will lead to job losses and potentially less work for those who have jobs, but maybe the increased capacity leads to greater output, more growth, more jobs. I know you have an aversion to making predictions, but as you look around, what are the counterintuitive repercussions you can see? Yeah, aside from the fact that we don't really know what the labor market will look like in 20 years because of the introduction of these technologies.

43:27I think one of the mistakes, again, we make is the idea of thinking of these technologies as somehow compressive. Like there's a funny sort of academic term, compressive or donative technologies. So people go rowing for fun, even though an outboard motor is more efficient because it's a donative act. I think one of the things that we're struggling with at the moment is thinking of things like AI as a compressive tool. And I think it's the same mistakes we made with labor-saving devices in the home in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. And the dream was that it would emancipate people, particularly women, from hard labor in the home.

44:01And all it did was just increase the expectations on women to do more things with the time that they had. They weren't off playing golf or having dinner parties, as the advert said. And I think we need to think about that more. It's like, if we're going to compress all of this stuff down and make it simpler, we don't get the afternoon off. The expectation is then that we produce twice as much.

44:20Kara Swisher:we'll be back in a minute

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45:40Kara Swisher:Now, Google, Meta and Microsoft have reported record spending on AI. It's astonishing, the amount of money they're spending. It's clear at least, and right now it's supporting the U.S. stock market, which is dangerous, to say the least. But could and should futurism, AI futurism is winning. But if we're in an AI bubble and it bursts, how do technologists who believe the promise of AI create momentum for their ideas? Because we've seen multiple AI winters before. This is not a new, AI is not new. So if the bubble bursts, does that mean the don't futurist narrative takes over for some time? I think it gives it oxygen for sure to say, you know, we were right.

46:17We should have been more concerned about these things. I think the distribution of this work is something I know you're fond of talking about. The distribution of where this work is happening and by whom and what their motivations are is a question that we need to have more broadly.

46:29Kara Swisher:Yeah. And the concentration of influence, because of the amount of money and the amount of resource it takes to build these models, that needs addressing it. I don't necessarily have an answer to that. At the beginning of the internet, as I said, it was inexpensive for innovators to create a website, create businesses. And in this case, only the large companies can do it. And therefore, it will be far less innovative if a homogeneous group of seven companies and with a very non-diverse group of people create everything. think we're going to get the same, you know, chicken dinner from all of them.

47:03Kara Swisher:Like, you're not going to get innovation out of large companies making decisions for the rest of us. It just seems logical. Yes, and they're mostly motivated by achieving the same sorts of goals, too. Right. And I think that's the challenge, is like, how do we build these systems that, by the way that they're built right now, require this huge amount of capital and resources to create. Energy, and energy, yes, of course. How do we take that and somehow, I won't say democratize, but offer alternative paths that allow smaller companies, different organizations? Well, that's creative or anything, because they're all the same.

47:35Kara Swisher:All the LLMs are the same. I'm sorry. Like, they're building the same thing together, and it's just one of them will win. It's sort of like Highlander, the movie. There can be only one at some point. Who's got the biggest sword? Who's got the biggest sword? Well, it's money. That's what it is. And it could be money well spent, and the winner will benefit from it. Everybody else will be the loser. which doesn't make, from a resource perspective, it's idiotic. So you write about the importance of resisting extremes, the uncritical hype of could futurism, and the paralysis of don't futurism can lead to dead ends, both of them in different ways, because people will either be disappointed when you don't get the dreamy future, or you could feel like you can't, paralysis.

48:16Kara Swisher:So what does a healthy relationship with our AI-enabled future look like for businesses and people here who are making these decisions? Yeah, I think finding a way to encourage everyone you meet and all of your teams to have conversations about the longer-term implications and the longer-term futures that we're interested in. And encouraging people to think about things in the round rather than just getting trapped into one of these corridors of thinking. It's very easy to say, we should do this because the data says so, or we could do this, I'm very excited about it, or we don't do this because it's scary.

48:45But I do think a well-rounded AI strategy, for want of a better term, is one that incorporates all of that and also incorporates the views of everybody in the organization who's building it. I do have a problem with this sort of othering of futures work and labifying of thinking about the future. You're here and you make the products. We're over here and we're thinking about the future because I've been in those environments for 25 years. And I think that there's sometimes a necessity to doing that for secrecy, for privacy, for lack of distraction. But I think it does other futures work in an unhealthy way, and it stops it being sort of integrated into the way of thinking.

49:22When you're in this sort of environment where the world is changing as quickly as it is with these new technologies that have huge capabilities, I think it is everybody's responsibility, not just job. It's everyone's responsibility to start thinking in longer term ways. Start thinking beyond the quarterly returns. Start thinking beyond the one year, even two year. start to really think.

49:41Kara Swisher:Well, that's hard though when your CEO is like, AI, we've got to do it. Sure. AI, we've got to do it. Fine. That's the sort of thing that CEOs say. But then what after that? Let's get into the detail. Let's talk about what we're actually going to do or excited about or fearful of. But it has become very hard to say no though, correct? I mean. I would think it's mostly FOMO at the moment. Is a CEO feels like they have to stand up and say AI, AI, AI. Because if they don't, the company's like, everyone else that I go to dinner with is talking about AI. Why aren't we talking about it? But I think that represents the experimental phase that we're talking about.

50:14I would hope that a smart CEO would say, we should look at this. It has the potential of big transformation. I think those could look like this. Let's explore that. But if it turns out not to be true in five years, just like, you know, moving to a different, whatever, server base or whatever it is that we thought was going to be a big thing that ended up not being, we might see a lot of companies going, do you know what? LLM's not for us. It's not really how our business works. doesn't make financial sense. Customers don't want it. We might move away from it. So I think at the moment we are in that space where it feels like you have to have some skin in the game and explore and experiment just to see if it's for you.

50:49But it doesn't mean to say we have to just grab the tiller of the boat and point it entirely over there.

50:54Kara Swisher:Yeah, I had a bunch of people like, you've got to get into this AI podcast. And I was like, yeah, I'll pass. And they were like, I'm not doing it. And they're like, well, you should try it. I'm like, yeah. I mean, the other option is to wait until it matures and then see if there's something there. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to be part of the experiment. Right, exactly. It seems like a giant waste of time and life is too short. But ultimately, you want us to identify a set of narratives we fall into when we talk about the future so we can think about it more rigorously. And that means thinking about all the mundane ways because the boring stuff is where things actually happen, which how we'll interact with technology in the future instead of this sci-fi, you know, we're all going to be wearing shoes that make us float, that kind of thing.

51:34Kara Swisher:I always use the example of electricity. Nobody today thought about electricity. No one went, oh, I'm on the electrical grid today as I turn on the light. You don't think of it, it becomes, to me, the most successful technologies are invisible. Yes. That's how I look at it. So what do you see for AI going forward? That sounds remarkably like asking me for a prediction, but we'll go with it. I think it's, like you say, when we stop talking about it, when it just becomes part and parcel, when it becomes embedded in the software that we're using, when we're truly honest about telling stories about the future.

52:07I use the example of ABS. When I was a kid, ABS braking on cars was a big thing. And cars had little Chrome ABS badges on the back. And now it's just sort of standard. It's not even listed. And we certainly don't see ABS badges. So I think getting past the badging phase of AI and just saying, that's how computers work now. They work in a slightly different way. And it gives you all these other things. I think that we need to be honest about what people really do with their software, which we're not. And then once we're honest about it, we need to see it sort of disappearing into the background and stop shouting about it so much and stop branding everything AI.

52:40Kara Swisher:Well, their market share numbers depend on it. That's why they're doing it. Of course. Last question. What's the most interesting deployment of AI you've seen of existing technology? I mean, I come at this from an art school background. I've mentioned art school twice as some sort of caveat for my answers, but that's where I come from. Some friends of mine have been training AI models on images of spoons. Spoons? Yes, spoons, you know, that we eat with every day. And created a huge training set of images of spoons and then asked AI to create three new spoons. And, you know, that's sort of interesting.

53:15And they were kind of weird and distorted and asymmetrical and they had weird blobs because of all the distortionary forces I was talking about. But what's lovely is they actually made them and they produced them and they found a silversmith in Italy to produce these spoons. And for me, that really epitomizes that thing I was talking about, about focusing on what's different about this, rather than just allowing us to make the perfect spoon faster or quicker. It allows us to think differently as a creative partner, as a way to sort of stimulate new directions of thought. And it's a very simple thing, and I'm sure the market share is zero, but it's interesting to me.

53:48And I think that is this little peek into the world.

53:50Kara Swisher:To rethink something. To rethink something and to push back. Computers haven't really pushed back on us very much. They've been very kind of servile, but now they're in this sort of negotiation phase of computing, which I find really interesting. So, yeah, it's a small group of designers who've been exploring this. Was it a better spoon? Define better. I have a trouble with the term better as well. It wasn't a better spoon. Well, you could still drink spoons. Spoons work pretty well. Spoons work great. I'm not a huge fan of spoon innovation. But you could still drink soup with it. Yeah. Thank you, Nick, so much for your time.

54:22Kara Swisher:And thank you, everybody. Thank you.

54:32Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Eloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kuroa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're an NPC. If not, you are banished to the metaverse without legs. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

55:07Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.

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