In Deus Ex (2000), megaplutocrat Bob Page deploys a new internet routing protocol he names Aquinas.
The effect of the protocol is to centralize all internet traffic to pass through Page’s routing infrastructure, where it can be subjected to surveillance and manipulation.
At the time this seemed so shortsighted and inefficient to me as to be unrealistic.
Yet the emerging vision of AI-enabled products has the EXACT same shape. Your every activity routed and influenced through a third party
Crud, there I go making the point that this is (also) an attempt to fix hundreds of incompatible APIs and data silos somehow, but that that‘s of course another platform market…
In the long arc of computing history, the pattern pursued by firms like Rabbit and Humane is common: they’re selling terminals or thin clients, because it’s cheaper to time share the upstream computing resources
Historically, as miniaturization and efficiency continue, time sharing and terminals would give way to dedicated, affordable, local resources
Except this chapter in human history presents serious disincentive to that pattern
You could even view web based SaaS as a quiet reversion
Thus the biggest danger of the AI computing paradigm shift is that it permanently wrests away our local control and data privacy, setting all new norms for a third party to interpose itself in every single interaction.
This is the model that consumer products will pursue without even considering the implications, because the simplest thing to do is wrap products around one of three commercial APIs and see if there’s a business there
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