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mimsical

@mimsical@mastodon.social

tech columnist @ wsj, here to make friends & chew bubblegum (& I'm all out of gum)

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mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

In ten years of writing about tech, I've gotten many things wrong.

Some of these errors in judgment are surprisingly common.

Here, gleaned from a decade of taking my lumps, is a thread about the 5 most common mistakes people make when thinking about the future:

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(and here's a gift link to the full article)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/what-i-got-wrong-in-a-decade-of-predicting-the-future-of-tech-06420bba?st=hcuxciink30xal3&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Most of history is people living nasty, brutish and short lives and modernity is a paradise by comparison, example 9,328:

Before the introduction in the 1920s of iodized salt, iodine deficiency was so widespread in the northeastern U.S. that it was known as the “goiter belt,” for the painfully enlarged thyroid glands that millions had as a result of this deficiency.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/05/01/iodized-salt-100-years-deficiency/

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

There are 180 million trucks in the U.S. (includes pickups, SUVs and 18-wheelers), and that number has grown 100+% in the past 20 years

at their current rate of growth, 100% of vehicles in the U.S. will be trucks by sometime early in the middle of the next decade

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1340-april-29-2024-total-number-trucks-increased-111-2002-2021-while

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

this is what I feel like anytime I try to use LinkedIn

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

“Artificial intelligence generates poetry. It generates polemics today that would be content that goes beyond picking, choosing, analyzing or digesting content. And that is not protected.”

-- Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, opining last year during a case that wasn't about AI, signaling how he'd rule were the question of whether companies are responsible for what their AIs say and do to come before the court

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

At least one litigator I talked to said that without action from Congress (which is unlikely) the threat of legal liability from using generative AI could become an "unsustainable burden" for many companies.

(Others argued it would mean only the biggest would continue to offer it to the public.)

Could this be an existential threat to today's public chat-bot LLMs?

I mean, yes! Which is why it's wild that so few people are talking about it, as far as I can tell.

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

“If we have these [generative AI] tools, and large volumes of people are doing dangerous things as a result of receiving garbage information from them, I’d argue it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to assign cost or liability as a result of these harms, or to make it unprofitable to offer these technologies.”

-- Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the Institute for Technology, Law & Policy at UCLA

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(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-industry-is-steaming-toward-a-legal-iceberg-5d9a6ac1?st=5rjze6ic54rocro&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

There's a host of legal risks AI companies and companies that use generative AI are putting themselves in the path of, that we don't talk about enough:

📜 It's pretty clear Section 230, the foundational law enabling today's internet, DOES NOT protect AI-generated content like that from ChatGPT, Claude or Google's generative search experience

🚗💥🚙 Generative AI could also put companies at risk of product liability claims

My deep dive:

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(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai-industry-is-steaming-toward-a-legal-iceberg-5d9a6ac1?st=fzthflzxv4l5hgn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

“If in the coming years we wind up using AI the way most commentators expect, by leaning on it to outsource a lot of our content and judgment calls, I don’t think companies will be able to escape some form of liability.”

-- Jane Bambauer, professor of law at the University of Florida

She's written a whole paper on yet a third category of legal risk using generative AI could open companies up to, which I didn't even have space for:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4432822

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

“Generative AI is the wild west when it comes to legal risk for internet technology companies, unlike any other time in the history of the internet since its inception.”

-- Graham Ryan, a litigator at Jones Walker who will soon be publishing a paper in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology the legal risks of generative AI and why Section 230 doesn't protect companies that use it

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mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

As a person who has actually ridden with harbor pilots before and wrote a whole book about shipping goods across oceans here’s a tiny bit of possibly clarifying detail about this horrible bridge tragedy:

If as reported there was a power failure on this container ship that could have been enough on its own to send it into the bridge.

Maneuvers for ships this large are incredibly tight when they are going in and out of harbors. We don’t think about it but harbor pilots perform miracles every day

mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Little else can be said about whatever happened with this ship and bridge until there’s more disclosure. Which I imagine will happen soon. Whatever happened, everyone on board knows. No point talking about it until rescue is complete.

I just hope the seven reported missing people are all found and safe.

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Sometimes I wonder what's happened to the people I've blocked. Do they even notice? Do they just find other people to attack in bad faith? Do they look up from their computers at their drab lives, sigh heavily, and wonder where the time went?

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

I spent the past two weeks using generative AI in every aspect of my life, both personal and professional.

At the end of my total immersion, here's my verdict:

The last time I had an experience this eye-opening and transformative was when I bought my first smartphone.

(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jobs-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-openai-cea961d5?st=wrosu8uv2tej8c8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Here's the thing about ChatGPT and the like: The reason it has close to 200 million users is that there are tons of people -- freelancers, small businesses -- who find it genuinely useful.

You're doing your own marketing in your spare time and you need tools to make it much easier to get your message out? This is the way.

Wordsmiths (like me) and artists might not like it, but this is the future of a lot of tossed off but important "content"

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

At the other end of the spectrum, knowledge workers who perform a large number of tasks that can't be automated, are still going to be using all kinds of AI assistants in the not too distant future. (Plenty of them already are.)

Today's GPTs are way more capable at some things than is immediately apparent. They are starting to become plain-language programming environments.

Hence all the custom GPTs in the OpenAI GPT Store.

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

This is not to say that today's GPTs think, or reason, or any of that nonsense.

But their everyday utility gets lost in all the noise about turning them into AGI, or a future in which everyone's on UBI because the machines took over, or whatever.

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Something real is going on here and it will profoundly alter the landscape of employment for millions of people -- there are 100 million 'knowledge workers' in the U.S. alone!

The only way to fully understand what's coming is to play with these AIs yourself. There's both less here than the zealots would have you believe, and way more than the critics argue.

(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/jobs-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-openai-cea961d5?st=43o4w9gbeuhh30g&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

I'm looking for people who were laid off from "big tech" and landed somewhere that's not that. This isn't for a particular piece for the WSJ, yet. I just want to listen and understand what stories there are here that need to be told. If you're this person or know one, I'd love to hear from you.

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

It’s the End of the Web as We Know It

And I feel... fine?

AI is eating the web from the bottom up, with AI-generated spam, and from the top down, through the replacement of search with AI and AI-powered "answer engines"

But look, the web has been enshittifying for a long time. Maybe this yields the kind of disruption we need?

this week's column (gift link)

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https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it-2ab686a2?st=ba0hp8fxnytl78x&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

I don't mean to be glib about what LLM-powered chatbots and AI-powered answer engines could do to the internet.

Research by Ethan Mollick and others shows that when people ask an AI for answers, they do not click on links those answers are referenced from.

This is extremely bad for a lot of publishers.

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mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

BUT it's also clear that since AIs can't function without human inputs, much depends on pending court cases and future legislation. If AI companies are forced to license human-generated content, that could be good for a lot of publishers -- maybe even better than the old ad-supported model.

ALSO the rise of AI spam means authentic and verified content will be higher value in the future.

3/🧵

mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Also, it's clear that LLM-powered search (aka 'generative search') is going to be a game-changer for seeking certain kinds of information.

A good example is consensus.app, a search engine for scientific literature.

It's what Google Scholar could have been if Google had actually invested in that product.

(gift link)

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it-2ab686a2?st=9injeumh94qvq2i&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

4/4

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

X's massive bot problem, in one chart, made by @o_simardcasanova

https://o.simardcasanova.net/data-illustrates-that-x-formerly-twitter-has-a-serious-bot-problem/

mimsical, to random
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

Prediction: Face computers like Apple's Vision Pro will become a norm -- if not the norm -- for that most mundane but essential of tasks: Office work.

For all Apple's talk of "spatial computing," the discoveries of the early adopter's of Apple's take on them, all point to their primary utility being mundane but -- at the right weight and price point -- subtly transformative:

They'll supplant the many screens we rely on already.

my latest:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apples-new-face-computer-is-for-work-788e2750

mimsical,
@mimsical@mastodon.social avatar

@Jonathanglick https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apples-new-face-computer-is-for-work-788e2750?st=2qigkxsk1tln8a8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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