AI job insecurity, Earth’s digital twin, and how Guinness became Britain’s favourite pint
Is AI going to steal my job?
There’s an increasing flurry of think pieces, podcasts, and articles with names like Will AI Take Your Job? and Future of Work. People in the workforce are concerned about their career prospects. Parents worry that their kids who study coding will soon be made irrelevant. Poets wonder whether LLM-generated verses will divert billions away from the poetry industry.
Okay, that last one is a joke. But individuals of all ages now have genuine fears about the employment impact of artificial intelligence, whether or not they already use generative AI themselves.
We feel negative emotions such as fear when faced with unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable situations. And now a giant, stinking bag of unpredictapoop has been left at our doorsteps. So we slam the door shut and ignore the stench. But even though we have no idea who left it there and why it’s suddenly our problem, we know in the back of our mind and the pit of our stomach we’ll have to deal with it at some point.
Maybe the real enemy isn’t that AI robot with the cup of tea. Maybe we need to zoom out further to see the river that we’re stuck navigating.
Newsflash: In the Global North we live in a capitalist society. The corporations that are developing AI products and services are fueled by capitalism. Should we be surprised that labor takes a backseat to profit as machine learning models mine, mill, and process the sum of human knowledge?
Now, I’m not a Marxist and I’m not an anarchist, so I don’t believe we should be re-occupying Wall Street tomorrow morning. (The redistribution of wealth away from the one percent should start with implementing a wealth tax and an inheritance tax, not destroying the wealth-creation machine itself.) What is worth exploring, if we want to see where the poop is coming from, are the different types of capitalism.
Capitalism as a concept is too broad to be helpful when analyzing the impact of AI. There's a difference between constructive capitalism and extraction capitalism. The first kind can connect communities by building bridges; the second kind can harm the planet by extracting coal and transporting it over those bridges.
The physical bridges of the Industrial Revolution became the digital bridges of the Information Age. And now it feels like we’re entering another era, with AI being capitalism’s shiny new resource. So, when it comes to machine learning products, we need to ask ourselves these questions:
What is being extracted? And what is being built?
Canadian journalist and author Cory Doctorow coined the word enshittification around eighteen months ago to explain how platforms such as Facebook produce a progressively shittier user experience as they maximize profits. What enshittification entails is that builders necessarily become extractors. This year, Doctorow has extended his thesis to the term “enshittocene” as a reflection of his belief that absolutely everything is turning to shit.
But we mere mortals who are not tech titans do have one important lever of control over what is happening: storytelling. It’s up to us to interpret our shifting reality in a way that benefits our humanity.
As historian Yuval Noah Harari noted in his book Sapiens, money is probably the most successful story ever told. So, what stories are being told right now about AI? How do they fit into other stories? Some think it spells doom for the human race. Others see it as our savior. Last month, one MIT economist suggested that AI might rebuild the American middle class.
Shared stories give us a framework for social cohesion. Just like the idea of money. When it comes to how we work with AI (and how it works with us), we should make sure that we are the ones writing the story.
Or maybe what will ultimately save us is that executives will themselves be afraid of being replaced and will slow the adoption of AI. Could AI create so much harmony between management and labor that they join hands from corner offices to cubicles, saying, “We’re all in this together”? That would really be a KumbAIya moment.
Apple’s Spatial Personas float into view
I’m going to assume that readers of this humble newsletter have not forked out thousands of dollars for the first version of the Apple Vision Pro headset that was launched at the same time as this humble newsletter last June. The device promises immersive connectivity with Mac products while retaining contact with the world around the wearer, for example, a child wishing that their dad didn’t look like such a dork in the living room. One of the dreams of the metaverse (although Apple will never employ that term) is to enable video meetings and other collaborative get-togethers where participants show up to each other as realistic floating 3D images of themselves, rather than cartoons. Apple has now announced the launch of Spatial Personas in SharePlay-enabled apps, meaning that up to five people can meet, chill, play, or watch entertainment together while seeing each others’ facial expressions and hand gestures.
This immersive environment also allows users to control what they see and also reposition objects without affecting other users' views. As with Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing platforms, I suspect that the main barrier to adoption might be situations where some meeting participants are present and some are remote. Imagine looking cool as an avatar but dorky to your colleagues sharing your office space. I’m curious to see how this plays out…
Turns out AI stands for Actually, Indians
Did you know that Amazon has brick-and-mortar stores? If you live in a major US city or places like Berlin, London, Milan, and Tokyo, the answer is probably yes. Amazon Fresh stores feature cashier-less shopping, with more than half the stores using cameras and other tech to automatically register purchases without the need for shoppers to scan each product separately at checkout.
This "Just Walk Out" AI-based technology is now being phased out when it came to light that in fact the majority of sales were being validated by a thousand real people in India who were simply checking video surveillance feeds from stores. Amazon had claimed that the technology was an achievement powered entirely by computer vision. The stores in question will now adopt “smart shopping carts” that keep track of products placed in them and automatically debits shopper accounts. Real people pretending to be AI? Sounds like a double-deepfake.
Waitrose and Winnow against waste
Food waste is a tough problem to solve. Restaurants and grocery stores would prefer it if they never threw out food that can’t be sold so they could maximize profits. And regular folk struggle to balance convenience with efficiency, even if they care about plastic pollution. Two organizations in the US and the UK are offering solutions that attack the issue from both of these angles.
American company Winnow bills itself as “the global AI leader in commercial food waste solutions.” Cameras installed above garbage bins in commercial kitchens recognize and analyze different types of food waste so that managers can make adjustments to supply chains, production quantities, and portion sizes to reduce waste. According to this article, 30% to 40% of food grown in the US goes uneaten.
Meanwhile in Britain, an anti-waste charity called Wrap issued a report about shoppers’ habits when purchasing packaged fruit and vegetables versus loose items, concluding that for loose to become the norm was not as simple as asking people or supermarkets to change. To help solve the packaging problem, Wrap is running a research project at a supermarket in England where shoppers are asked to wear eye-tracking glasses to collect data on their behavior and preferences as they select produce. The Guardian reports on the competing incentives for shoppers and stores, while also revealing the barely believable statistic that Brits throw out nearly 3 million potatoes every single day. Those tons of tossed taters are a terrible trash tragedy.
Mark Schaefer, personal branding and marketing strategist
It often seems like social media has no redeeming features. But if you’re a marketer on a mission rather than a teen who can’t stop scrolling, the socials are still a powerful way to create a direct connection with new audiences. I asked Mark Schaefer, who writes one of the top five marketing blogs in the world, for his take on the best way to leverage social media.
Q. Do you see social media as a platform to distribute content intended to build a personal brand or as a medium to promote an offline personal brand that is usually leveraged through things like public speaking opportunities and articles in niche publications?
A. Neither. I no longer regard social media as a strategy. It is the beginning of a process.
If we are trying to build a brand, either a personal brand or for a company, we are trying to build some emotional connection to our audience. Brand marketing is about building an emotional expectation.
In terms of doing that, social media does a fairly poor job. When you post on social media, it might feel like you are throwing a message in a bottle out into a massive silent ocean. Who is seeing it? What do they think?
Who knows?
The power of social media is reach. We have the opportunity to connect to people who have never heard of us. We can make first impressions. The real power comes if we can tempt people to click and drive them to our content. Now it gets interesting. If we can persuade people to subscribe to our content, we've increased the emotional connection dramatically because they have become part of an audience. In a virtual way, they have raised their hand saying "I like you. It's OK to communicate to me. I want to learn more."
Unfortunately, this is where most companies stop. The ultimate step is to then lead your content audience into a brand community. An audience is one-way. If the content goes away, the audience goes away. But in a community, people get to know each other and become friends. That adds a layer of emotional switching costs to your brand marketing strategy. That is the ultimate connection.
So in this way, social media is just the beginning of a process to lead connections to content and then a content audience to a brand community.
Mark W. Schaefer is a globally recognized author, keynote speaker, futurist, and business consultant who blogs at {grow} — one of the top five marketing blogs in the world. He teaches graduate marketing classes at Rutgers University and has written 10 best-selling books. Mark’s new book Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy describes an essential new path to connect to customers in the modern digital world.
His many global clients include Pfizer, Cisco, Dell, Adidas, and the US Air Force. He has been a keynote speaker at prestigious events all over the world, including SXSW, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and the Institute for International and European Affairs. Mark has appeared as a guest on media channels such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CBS News.
Does our planet have a twin? Yup, and it’s digital!
Nvidia is a corporation you might have heard of because it makes the GPU chips that power the big AI platforms and last month became the world’s third-most valuable company. What you might not know is that Nvidia also creates “digital twins” such as simulated car factories that precisely replicate real-world factories to enable safety and efficiency testing and employee training at far lower cost. Now the company has announced a digital twin of the earth, called (of course) Earth-2.
Although simulated reality might seem like a Black Mirror episode, Earth-2 is a “climate digital twin cloud platform for simulating and visualizing weather and climate at unprecedented scale.” Until now, weather simulations have been accurate at scales of up to 20km, but Nvidia’s software enables a resolution of 1.25km. The product’s API will allow “virtually any user to create AI-powered emulations to speed delivery of interactive, high-resolution simulations ranging from the global atmosphere and local cloud cover to typhoons and turbulence.”
If Earth-2 works as claimed, it could be enormously helpful. Dynamic systems like weather are famously difficult for scientists to predict. In fact, in classical mechanics it only takes three elements for a system to become chaotically unpredictable, never mind the thousands of factors that influence the weather. (This is the origin of the phrase, the three-body problem, which inspired a Chinese sci-fi novel of the same name that is now a hit TV series).
Taiwan, where the majority of the world’s GPU chips are manufactured, is certainly vulnerable to extreme weather events. The Nvidia press release quotes Chia-Ping Cheng, administrator at Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration: “Taiwan is a critical component of the global supply chain, and flooding risk analysis and evacuation preparedness are core to our mandate.” Looks like Nvidia is taking cloud computing seriously and literally.
How did Guinness become Britain’s favourite pint?
Guinness is one of the world’s oldest and most iconic brands. The stout was mentioned in writing by Charles Dickens and is behind some of the best TV ads of all time, from crazy cartoons to visual concepts and from classic storytelling to metaphorical imagery. (That Surfer ad not only won more awards than any other in 1999, it was also directed by Jonathan Glazer, who just won an Academy Award for the movie Zone of Interest.)
Guinness products are sold in 150 countries worldwide and this episode of Jon Evans’s Uncensored CMO podcast features an interview with Stephen O’Kelly, the Global Brand Director for Guinness and a fourth-generation Guinness employee. The amazing thing is that the world’s most popular stout isn’t the same product everywhere, so the brand has always needed to be adaptable while retaining core elements. O’Kelly explains how he shepherds the brand through different markets worldwide while sharing a pint of the black stuff with Evans at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin. I was really thirsty after listening to this…
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