Nilay Patel on software brain: “a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms, databases and loops”:

that is pure software brain: the idea that we can force the real world to act like a computer

Folly.

I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people.

Computers 👏 should 👏 adapt 👏 to 👏 people.

the tech industry is rushing forward to put AI everywhere at enormous cost […] and locked into the narrow framework of software brain without realizing they are also asking people to be fundamentally less human. They then sit around wondering why everyone hates them.

Tim Berners-Lee:

[doctors and lawyers] take oaths and are culturally bound to support the best interests of the client, not of the person who pays them.

He argues that AI needs this capability or else it will always end up prioritizing the interests of those who build it over those who use it.

Which is what a lot of software now-a-days feels like.

Society has long hinged on photographs (and video) to give us the truth. When authorities concealed reality or it was too far away to understand, photos and videos told us the truth.

If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express

Sure there has been fake photos and video, but they’ve been the exception. But that’s all about to change.

the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after

No one on Earth today has ever lived in a world where photographs were not the linchpin of social consensus

Here’s how the product folks building this stuff think about it:

the group product manager for the Pixel camera described the editing tool as “help[ing] you create the moment that is the way you remember it, that’s authentic to your memory and to the greater context, but maybe isn’t authentic to a particular millisecond.” A photo, in this world, stops being a supplement to fallible human recollection, but instead a mirror of it.

So photos are just our own hallucinations? Because human memory is not very good.

Really interesting writeup on the history of robots.txt (I’ve written previously about my feelings around robots.txt and AI bots).

the main focus of robots.txt was on search engines; you’d let them scrape your site and in exchange they’d promise to send people back to you. Now AI has changed the equation: companies around the web are using your site and its data to build massive sets of training data, in order to build models and products that may not acknowledge your existence at all.

The robots.txt file governs a give and take; AI feels to many like all take and no give.

That’s the problem: the incentives for an open web are quickly dwindling.

In the last year or so, the rise of AI products like ChatGPT, and the large language models underlying them, have made high-quality training data one of the internet’s most valuable commodities. That has caused internet providers of all sorts to reconsider the value of the data on their servers, and rethink who gets access to what. Being too permissive can bleed your website of all its value; being too restrictive can make you invisible. And you have to keep making that choice with new companies, new partners, and new stakes all the time.

Great ending:

[the creators of robots.txt] believed that the internet was a good place, filled with good people, who above all wanted the internet to be a good thing. In that world, and on that internet, explaining your wishes in a text file was governance enough. Now, as AI stands to reshape the culture and economy of the internet all over again, a humble plain-text file is starting to look a little old-fashioned.

We can watch really old movies today — movies that aren’t just years or decades old, but generations old. We can read works of literature that are centuries old. But we can’t play iPhone games that are three years old unless the developers constantly devote time and attention to making sure they keep up with latest SDKs every 2-3 years? Pixar doesn’t have re-render Toy Story every couple of years.

That’s the great thing about the web: if you own your content on your own website 1) you’re not subject to a giant corporation kicking you out (you’re only subject to your own forgetfulness or inability to rent your domain or pay your hosting bill) and 2) websites can have a much longer shelf life than something from a native OS SDK.

The first iPhone app isn’t available on a modern iPhone, but the first website is still accessible from a modern browser—even on an iPhone, 1st or latest generation. Think about that!