Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. And we’re going to talk about AI and how it’s changing the world of software in just a minute.

[intro music]

Paul: Richard, how was your week?

Rich: Pretty good. Pretty intense. Pretty intense week.

Paul: It’s been a busy week. I just want to give everybody a heads up. This is going to be a fun and frolic episode of this podcast.

Rich: Oooh!

Paul: If you’re looking for deep insights, you can go ahead and wait till next week.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: We’re going to have a little fun.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Yes. Why was it intense? Because it was intense for me, too.

Rich: Well, it’s been a long time coming. You can go to aboard.com and play with our tool. You can build software with our tool. Now we don’t hand you the code back, like most tools. You can get a taste of what Aboard is capable of.

Paul: Don’t apologize.

Rich: I’m not apologizing.

Paul: Let’s just, let’s very quickly explain what’s going on. We have, this is a soft launch. We have taken our, we’ve taken what we do and we’ve put it out online.

Rich: Well, you said it on the podcast, Paul. So now it’s hard.

Paul: It is, but it’s sort of like, we’re not marketing, we’re not really pushing hard.

Rich: It’s an impotent launch.

Paul: You’re in— [laughing] You’re in there early.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: You’re in there early. If you want to go look.

Rich: Yes, yes, yes.

Paul: When you go to Aboard, you can type in a prompt and it will spin up real working software. It doesn’t use AI to write the code. It uses AI to build sort of the scaffolding. It turns it into real code and it gives you a demo that you can use. If you want to keep going with it and you want to build with it.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: You get in touch with us. Because AI can’t do everything. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you’ve been hearing us discover that.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Like, there are just hard limits to what AI can pull off, but it can save you—you would spend a fraction of money and time of what you used to if you use these technologies wisely, not just with us. And so—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Check it out. Feel free to get in touch.

Rich: Go play. Go play.

Paul: And like I said, soft launch. So we really want your feedback, we want your thoughts.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So there’s that. And I also just want to let people know, next week is July 4th. We’re going to take a week off, content-wise.

Rich: Mmm!

Paul: If you notice, a little emptiness in your heart, that is because we’re taking a little break.

Rich: You barbecuing?

Paul: Probably. Yeah, we always do. We tend to have people over, which means I got a mow.

Rich: I don’t think I’ve ever been invited, but whatever.

Paul: You’re always invited and you never come. It’s hurtful.

Rich: No, you can’t just say that. “Oh, you’re always invited!”

Paul: No, no, you are actually—

Rich: That’s bullshit.

Paul: You’re actively invited.

Rich: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, I think you might be right.

Paul: Yeah. This doesn’t—

Rich: I forgot.

Paul: This hasn’t gone the way you thought it was going to go.

Rich: I know. Okay.

Paul: Okay, so let’s have some fun in frolic, Richard.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: We have this new office, which, if I turn the camera around, you could all see, but it’s pretty, it has a nice view. And I brought—

Rich: This is the first time we’ve recorded in our new podcast studio, which will be our permanent one.

Paul: That’s exactly right. It’s really great. People have done a lot of work to help us get set up.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: We’ve got our books behind us.

Rich: Yep.

Paul: This is not an automatic background.

Rich: Live from New York.

Paul: It’s very exciting! And so I have a very large collection, or medium-sized collection, of books about technology and culture that I’ve amassed over the last 20-some years. And they’ve been kind of—we had them at our old agency, then we sold the agency. I took the books home. They’ve been kind of jammed on shelves.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: And there’s a lot of them. They’re not just the ones behind us. There’s like whole other shelves around the office. The office has a very cool library vibe to it, which makes me—cool library!

Rich: It does, it does. It’s like, you ever go to, like, historic libraries where there’s not really any books, just a lot of tables?

Paul: That’s where we’re at here. That’s what we’re going for.

Rich: You know what I’m talking about?

Paul: No, I do. And that’s—

Rich: It’s very strange.

Paul: That’s the exact vibe I love more than anything in the world. And so—

Rich: Yeah, here we are.

Paul: We have that here. And it really does make me, like, in the morning, I’m like, “I better get, get my act together and get in the office,” and I’m like, “Yeah, because my books are there.” It’s real exciting.

Rich: It’s nice, it’s very nice.

Paul: Anyway, many of the artifacts I have are older, and I have this old copy and I have probably many dozens of copies of Omni magazine. Okay?

Rich: Whoa!

Paul: Do you know anything about Omni?

Rich: I do know about Omni magazine.

Paul: Okay. What do you know about it?

Rich: It’s sort of… Well, I know that Bob Guccione, who published Penthouse.

Paul: Penthouse. Penthouse magazine.

Rich: Penthouse magazine, which was essentially—

Paul: It was a literary magazine! Known for its incredible letters section.

Rich: No.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Penthouse was like a slightly raunchier Playboy magazine.

Paul: Yeah. It was halfway between Playboy and Hustler in the era of, like, 70s, 80s, like…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Where that was the main way that people consumed erotic content was going and buying a magazine.

Rich: Yes. And Hustler was—

Paul: This is for the audience, this is just terrible because, yes, your grandfather had needs. That’s what we’re telling them.

Rich: Yes, yes, yes. And Hustler, well, we don’t have to get into the different sort of levels of pornography that were available in magazines or adult imagery.

Paul: No. God, we really—we really can’t.

Rich: We really can’t. I’d love to. It would be an interesting conversation.

Paul: We’re selling a product here.

Rich: We’re selling a product here. And what was interesting about this time is the publishers viewed themselves not just as like, “Oh, I put out nude pictures in magazines.” They viewed themselves as publishers. And Playboy was famous for having, their interviews were legendary, and they had like a letters section, and they were just, they were trying to be more than just—

Paul: Oh, no, they published major, major fiction. And they were very proud of—

Rich: Can we talk about this for, like, one minute? Like, I found Playboy magazine. I was a kid. I was 14 or whatever. And it was very confusing to me.

Paul: You were like, “I don’t care about jazz!” Yeah.

Rich: It was confusing. There were like five pages of nudie pictures, and the rest was all these words. And I’m like, 14. I’m like, “What is going on?”

Paul: A new story by Kurt Vonnegut. What really happened in Vietnam. And then Miss October. [laughter]

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah. It was a very confusing message for everybody.

Rich: So back to Omni magazine. Bob Guccione, who was the publisher of Penthouse magazine.

Paul: He wanted to do something a little less naked.

Rich: He went all in and created, I think, what’s, it’s more like a, not sci-fi. It’s, like, a futurist magazine.

Paul: It’s like if Scientific American got incredibly high.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: A lot of the pages are literally printed on silver.

Rich: It’s a cool… The aesthetic is damn cool.

Paul: So we have a lot of them in the office. If you’re interested, you can stop by. But I’m going to just, I want to—you know, it’s wild looking through this.

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: So I’m looking at the April 1980 issue.

Rich: Wow.

Paul: So we’re now 45 years away from this.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Okay? That feels bad.

Rich: Ah, that feels crazy.

Paul: Feels real bad.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: The opening essay is by Frank Herbert.

Rich: Who’s Frank Herbert?

Paul: He wrote the book Dune and then many of the follow-ups.

Rich: A legendary sci-fi writer.

Paul: Okay, so Frank’s opening essay, there’s, like, 10 things in here that I think we should discuss, because we’re talking about how AI is changing everything and everything’s changing all the time and so on. It feels weirdly familiar.

Rich: I have a—first off, shout out to our friend Jason, who, Dune somehow ended up in the picture again.

Paul: Oh, yeah, no, he actually just woke up. Jason Goldman, he has a podcast. Just type “Jason Goldman Dune” and you’ll find this podcast. He’s one of the most informed Frank Herbert people on the face of the earth.

Rich: So he’ll enjoy this podcast.

Paul: So—well, we’re gonna talk about more than Frank Herbert, but he might. Let’s hope he enjoys it.

Rich: Well, let’s talk about what Frank was thinking tossing out 45 years ago.

Paul: Okay. “You should learn to use your own computer. You will find it rewarding and fun for nothing else than the freedom it gives you from tedious jobs.” Okay, so that’s where he opens. Let me just skip forward. “Computer crime is on the upswing. Clever programmers each year are stealing millions of dollars through their inside knowledge of computers. If you own a business and it uses computers in any way, it would not hurt you to know a few of the basics.” Let me read you two more things. [laughter] “Computer automation may be creeping up on your job.”

Rich: Wait, hold on. He doesn’t go through the basics?

Paul: No.

Rich: He just tossed it out? Like, know the basics.

Paul: Go learn the basics.

Rich: Fine. Okay. Keep going.

Paul: “Automation’s creeping up on your job. This makes it a matter of survival for you to know how you can benefit from these machines.”

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: “We’re already surrounded by people who use the computer as an excuse for avoiding personal responsibility.” Like Facebook. “How many times have you heard this excuse? ‘We’re very sorry about the mistake in your account. It was a computer error.’ This is a lie. It leads to mental parasitism, a destructive dependency. Every time you hear this excuse, you should tell the person who uses it, ‘You are a liar.'” And then in all caps: “COMPUTERS DO NOT MAKE ERRORS.” So…

Rich: Whoa.

Paul: But also, like, just a little bit of phrasing aside, what’s different? Like, we keep talking about how AI is this radical new thing that is changing everything, and it kind of—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Compared to what was there before. But like, from a point of view of the 80s where this stuff was just landing and they were trying to make sense of what it all meant?

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: His reaction is the same as everybody’s reaction today.

Rich: Well, I think it speaks to a couple of things. One is humans are very good at wriggling out a responsibility when things get a little complicated, because complexity is, is an amazing obfuscation tool. Right? So I mean, the most classic example of that is like, you know,”Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Like, there’s that argument that gets—

Paul: Guns are involved. It’s a gun-involved people killing.

Rich: [laughing] Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right.

Rich: I think what, what Frank here is, you know, is kind of warning about, but couldn’t foresee, is that they got, the computers got really, really good to the point where they got ahead of our—we got ahead of ourselves, right?

Paul: This is real. I’ll see if I can find it. But there’s literally a big—I mean, this is the day of green screens.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: We’re not, we’re not looking—like, there’s no windowing interface. There’s, there’s nothing like that.

Rich: Yeah, it’s 1980.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Windows 3.1 doesn’t come until, I think the later 80s, if I’m not mistaken.

Paul: No, that’s exactly right. They know windowing is coming, but not yet for anybody.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Or if you have it, it’s $35,000—

Rich: They’re work machines.

Rich: Whoa.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: At this point. They’re not in homes yet.

Paul: IBM is the big brand. All right, so, Rich.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I got an ad here.

Rich: Okay. I love ads.

Paul: “Just between you, me and the computer.” Now, it’s an ad from the IBM Corporation.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Okay? And they are saying there’s information—so we’re talking about business computing, this—

Rich: Pure business.

Paul: There’s—

Rich: Microsoft has not come for them yet.

Paul: No, it’s a baby.

Rich: I think it’s formed. It’s a baby.

Paul: It’s a baby.

Rich: They license DOS.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That’s it.

Paul: Like, they’re one of the success stories. But who knows if they’re even worth like $100 million.

Rich: Yeah, unclear.

Paul: “There’s information about you in a computer somewhere, probably in several computers. It’s a fact of modern life. You have credit cards, insurance policies. You reserve seats on airplanes. You borrow money. Occasionally you pay taxes.” Honestly, your life sounds pretty good.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: “All these things require information about you. And you’re concerned about how safe it all is in a computer system.”

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: “So are we. At IBM, we think computers should be good at protecting information, as good as they are at processing it, etc.” So here’s Frank Herbert on one side going like, “Man, don’t you buy a word of it, et cetera. et cetera.” We’re talking about, like, blinky screens here, like, you know.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And then over here you got IBM saying, “Hey, yeah, your stuff isn’t secure. And we know all about it.”

Rich: Yeah. I think there’s two takeaways. I always number my responses. It’s kind of clever.

Paul: Honestly, this is classic executive.

Rich: Is that right?

Paul: You’re just a human bullet point.

Rich: Oof.

Paul: No, it’s not even a criticism.

Rich: All right, so here’s what’s sly about this ad. One of the most powerful things technology consulting can do, especially in this point in the history of computing, is create anxiety and sell off of it. You can create, you could get people nervous, and then you pick up the phone—this is in a general interest sort of science magazine.

Paul: Fear or greed, right? You get one or the other.

Rich: I’m making—

Paul: They’re going for fear here.

Rich: They’re going for fear. And you know what you should do? You should have experts come in and make sure and audit and button up your data, your information. Like, this is stuff that used to be in safes, right? That you’d put it in a safe.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Like, literally put it—

Paul: At the end of the day, you turn—

Rich: Locked cabinet, and that would be that. And now the information is sort of inside of these machines and that spawns, like, this was such a seismic change to just how we work and how we communicate and how we—

Paul: This is real. The people putting the numbers for the, like, the credit card accounts or the regular bills—

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: —or whatever into the computer, started their careers 10 or 15 years before writing them down on slips of paper and filing them, then locking a filing cabinet.

Rich: What else are you going to do?

Paul: That’s what you were going to do.

Rich: You had to do it.

Paul: And so now you’ve put it into this place and everybody’s like, “I think it’s okay.” And then you’re reading stories in the paper about how 10,000 credit card numbers were—probably back then it was, like, 50.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Everybody’s like, “Oh my God, we lost 50. That’s like 80% of the credit cards.”

Rich: We could talk for a minute about the incredible shift IBM took from being essentially a hardware company, a company that made computers, realizing that hardware was going to get commoditized and then shifting, because the asset that they really had was all those relationships, right? And all those, they were embedded in all these businesses. To this day, IBM is a consulting juggernaut more than anything else. Right?

Paul: IBM is, you know, if you’re not in the industry. It has the most sort of legendary sales culture. Like, they used to have songs that they sang.

Rich: That’s what we—

Paul: —in the 20s.

Rich: Oh, okay.

Paul: But like, you know, like, [singing a fight song] “Hail to Thomas Watson!”

Rich: Yeah. Oh, you’re talking about, like, oooold-school IBM.

Paul: Yeah, because it goes way, way back.

Rich: There’s probably an ’80s IBM rap somewhere.

Paul: Oh, there probably is.

Rich: There probably is.

Paul: Almost—

Rich: But I also think what this highlights, like, no one can predict where it’s all going to go. IBM’s like, “Yeah, we’ve got credit card info on your flight info.” Who knew that they were going to know when I was shopping for a sweater at four in the morning. Right? Like, there’s that.

Paul: I think the thing is those patterns showed up so early.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And we’re still working with them. Like I’m looking, there’s a silver section of this magazine.

Rich: I’m gonna tell you something, Paul, I’m gonna  tell you something I learned about from the pandemic.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Pandemic happens. We all go home. And I think it was seven or eight months later, I came back to our office. It was an office that had maybe 50, 60 people humming at any given time. And when I went back to the office, there were rotten smoothies on the desks, there were sweaters laid over the chairs. And what it told me was we are really lousy at really estimating the implications of things. We thought we were gonna be back in a week.

Paul: I remember that moment. Because I was one of the first to come back to the office. Our old office.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: My blazer was still over the back of the chair.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And for me that’s very symbolic because it’s sort of, like, “Oh, I got a meeting, I got a pitch, whatever, I’m gonna put that blazer on.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: And I’d taken it off, left the office, and now it was, like, a year later.

Rich: It’s insane, right? And what that tells me when you look at tech, we’re so ambitious around tech, and we always kind of try to plan for where the ball’s gonna be, and we always underestimate, always underestimate. Like, it’s inevitable. And then we try to catch up. Right? And that’s happening now. Like, right now there’s a tension between, well, AI is going to come for us all. And then it’s like, well, we got to let the free markets kind of figure this out.

Paul: You know what’s tricky is you’re not allowed to say, like, I’m gonna read you one more here.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: This is from the middle section.

Rich: Silver.

Paul: “A computer may have saved a man’s life recently when officials at the University of Wisconsin Medical School’s clinic learned that a patient who was about to be released after treatment for depression had a gun, bullets, and a precise suicide plan. Though some 80% of self-inflicted deaths result from depression, the clinic therapist failed to discover the patient’s intent until a computer programmed by a professor of preventive maintenance and by psychiatrist John Greist predicted he would try to take his life.” So, but, but the thing is, is like this pattern is still here. It’s the privacy pattern and the, can we, can we predict behavior? And now we’re using AI—there’s, like, people who are doing AI to predict crimes.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it drives people who care about, like, criminal justice absolutely bananas, for classic reasons.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: It’s all here, the same patterns. It doesn’t change that much. So it’s very hard. Let me ask you a fundamental question.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What is new? Like, as a category, what is a new technology? What does that mean? Because the next one, I’m not even going to read it, but there’s one here about electronic voting.

Rich: I think what’s so interesting about tech, in this context, is that tech turns into money when it wedges itself.

Paul: It’s the ultimate middleman, isn’t it?

Rich: It’s the ultimate middleman.

Paul: Like, Amazon is ultimately a middleman between the consumer and every single manufacturer on earth.

Rich: Yeah, yeah. And what’s interesting about Amazon wedged itself, and then when Amazon wedged itself, it created all these other industries around data markets and security and shipping and—

Paul: And resellers.

Rich: And resellers. And so there’s a cascade effect because when, sometimes when, when tech wedges, it opens up space that wasn’t there. And when, and when money goes to a certain place, the mechanism to contain it and not let it slip through kick in as well. So the security industry around these things and the privacy industry around these things and the insurance industry, like I can’t imagine Amazon’s insurance policies. Right?

Paul: [sighing] And so this is a brutal answer though. What defines what’s new and exciting about technology?

Rich: Oh, nothing.

Paul: Money. Money.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, look man…

Paul:  I mean, that’s what VCs think. I’m serious. Like, that’s what they do. They’re like, “Hey, if we find something exciting and interesting, put money against it, it has a better chance of getting like a thousand X return than any other investment we could make.” That’s what technology does. I think it’s why they get so hypnotized by crypto. Because it was perfect that way. It was, you just literally made money out of air.

Rich: What is appealing to VCs is what is destructive. Like, by its nature.

Paul: We’re gonna take money from there.

Rich: Well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna disrupt the status quo, right? Like, Uber. I mean, everything, just about every, like, even technology companies that render other technology companies moot are interesting to VCs. Anything that is going to shake up the system in some disruptive way. Is that new? Sometimes, you know, I love talking about Dropbox because it’s such an unusual success story. Because if you had pitched Dropbox, you’d be like, there’s like 10 of those.

Paul: Well, there’s a classic Hacker News thread where people are like, “This is never gonna work.”

Rich: It’s never gonna work. And if you really look at what Dropbox did different is that they, like, it just seemed to work right away without anybody doing anything. And that was like, that disrupted the industry.

Paul: It sat there in your menu bar.

Rich: It sat there in your menu bar.

Paul: I’m going to be, I’m going to—I guess this is my job. I’m going to give a more positive read of what newness is.

Rich: I don’t mean, I don’t, I wouldn’t imply that that was negative, but go ahead.

Paul: Fair enough. To me, the newness is, it’s a similar idea, but it’s less economic. It’s about a new technology shifts power. So the internet, for a long time didn’t shift power towards money. It shifted power towards individuals who were publishing things, who previously, and I was one of them, didn’t really know how to publish things, didn’t have a way to get an audience or to build a voice.

Rich: You could have a website.

Paul: You could have a website. The website didn’t translate to money. That phase did not translate to money. But it definitely changed the balance of power to the point that—

Rich: For, like, 20 minutes.

Paul: No, for, like, many years.

Rich: I mean, 20 minutes—

Paul: But eventually the bloggers kind of got absorbed by—and all the media changed as a result of this.

Rich: Yes, it did.

Paul: The bloggers got absorbed by classic media brands, et cetera, et cetera.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But that was a change. It didn’t just happen that money came in and absorbed everything. Like, a vast space in the world was different.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And I do think, like, I’ll give you another one. Peer-to-peer technologies, sharing music via Napster, whatever, that for better or for worse, the recording industry is unrecognizable compared to what it was before—

Rich: Because of that.

Paul: Yeah. And now we do have Spotify and Apple Music and so on, and they are a reaction to the fact that everybody could just help themselves.

Rich: Cat was out of the bag anyway.

Paul: We were fining children $3,000.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: For a while there. And that was really bad, too.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: So I do think it might be positive, might be negative, social media, so on and so forth. So I think where AI is now new is where it changes power dynamics. When it’s changing a power dynamic so that Sam Altman has a lot of power? He’s mostly taking power away from Amazon or Microsoft or Google. Like, that doesn’t feel like he’s, like, Sam Altman getting a lot of power doesn’t—it changes individual dynamics among people who kind of already run a chunk of the economy.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it doesn’t really change the world. But what does change the world is 400 million people kind of saying, “Hey, help me write code,” or, “Help me…” Like, there’s the positive case and the negative case. People dwell on the negative case. But boy, can you learn a lot with this thing. It’s taught me more about modular synths and piano playing than anyone but my piano teacher, who I don’t know if I would be spending the money on the piano teacher if AI hadn’t kind of coached me.

Rich: When you say this thing, you mean AI?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: ChatGPT. So I think like it’s an additive technology, if used wisely.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And that it can kind of take some power and authority away. But whenever you do that, a surprising number of people would really prefer stability.

Rich: I think when you flip through this magazine?

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: it sort of oscillates between optimism and dire warnings, always, right?

Paul: Well, you know what it is? You’ve got the science-fiction narratives, like, the stories in here, and the stories are like, “World’s ending.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And then the articles are, like, “They found a new way to do solar power.”

Rich: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: And there’s very—optimism in fiction is very suspicious and maybe boring.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Whereas optimism in the reporting—

Rich: Is there a lot of fiction in this?

Paul: Tons.

Rich: Oh, okay.

Paul: They published a lot of the big sci-fi, like, George Martin who did Game of Thrones, Arthur Clarke, Asimov. Everybody’s kind of in here.

Rich: Got it. This sort of distills down how you view things and how I view things.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: I do think AI is additive because I think you can learn things very, very quickly and you have access to information in a very low overhead sort of way that you didn’t have before. Yeah, you could go read a lot of articles on the internet, but my God, if you’re curious, it’s a wonderful friend to have. Right? Because it’ll teach you and you can dive in deeper and deeper. I jump to the end of the movie, which is when these forces land, they get appropriated, inevitably. It just can’t not happen that way.

Paul: You are right. They wash out. If the power is real and the rebalance of power happens. The ultimate upshot is a lot of cultural change and a big economic shift.

Rich: Microsoft and OpenAI are kind of at each other’s throats right now.

Paul: Yeah!

Rich: Not buddy-buddy.

Paul: Talk about that.

Rich: So OpenAI has decided to acquire a company called Windsurf.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Windsurf is a code-assist tool.

Paul: It’s like a whole, like, IDE environment.

Rich: It’s a whole environment. It’ll help you with coding and whatnot. And Microsoft is threatening to sue, if they haven’t already sued OpenAI, because they say that, “Based on our original partnership agreement, any tech you appropriate has to trickle up to us.”

Paul: I mean, fair enough. They spent billions on this thing.

Rich: OpenAI is saying, “No, this is ours.” And the lines are getting drawn. And so what’s happening is—

Paul: I would have called the lawyers first. [laughter] But, you know, I don’t think they do. It’d be like, “I’m sure they did.” They may not have.

Rich: They may not have.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And look, in the end, what this is highlighting, that this is all just a symptom of what’s going to eventually play out, which is, it’s too much land and it’s too good and the soil’s rich and we—whose is it again? That’s playing out right now. Right? And everyone’s getting more suspicious. Everyone’s getting territorial. And I think OpenAI started as a nonprofit. I can’t tell anymore if it is one. It’s like some sort of hybrid.

Paul: It’s sort of in between. It did. It started as, like, a not-for-profit focused on AGI. There’s another aspect, too, which is, we’ve talked about this before, but, like, it’s pretty clear the giants are no longer very concerned about AGI and thinking robots. They just want these LLMs to work better.

Rich: And they want them to fit into their world. And that’s happening right now.

Paul: Then you see, on the flip side, that OpenAI strategy is starting to mirror that, except instead of being a focus on, like, total artificial intelligence, it’s buying a coding-assistant tool. We’ve talked about this.

Rich: Yes, yes.

Paul: Right? So it’s saying, “Hey, we’re going to go for the operating system model as well.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: If I was Microsoft, I’d be frickin’ pissed.

Rich: There are a few jewels that, from day one, establish themselves as such that they can’t be appropriated and are still a force on the internet, right? Craigslist, to this day.

Paul: That was by design.

Rich: So is Wikipedia.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: There are few jewels that are out there that thought ahead and said, “If you try to do that, I self destruct.”

Paul: You gotta give it to Craigslist, too. Like, there were so many opportunities.

Rich: Oh my God.

Paul: First of all, everybody did real good. Like—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Craig Newmark has, like, large endowments.

Rich: Yeah. I mean, Craigslist is Craigslist.

Paul: No, no. But he funds journalism.

Rich: I mean. Yeah. Well, he also wrecked the classifieds in every newspaper.

Paul: I think he takes it personally. Like, I think—

Rich: Oh, is that right?

Paul: Maybe. I don’t know. But, like, but yeah. No, no, no. I think, I was at a journalism award ceremony, and they gave him an award and it got real quiet.

Rich: Oof. Yeah. That’s a rough one.

Paul: Yeah, it was, people are a little miffed. It’s not their fault they blame the—classifieds should have stopped sucking and figured out how to, like… Anyway.

Rich: Like, if it wasn’t Craig, you had the internet and classifieds.

Paul: At least it was Craigslist. Craigslist is still a good site. If you go, unless you go and look at the conversation parts.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You don’t want to see the people who choose to spend their conversation points.

Rich: No, that’s not what it’s for. That’s not what it’s for. It’s, “I left a working fridge out.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: “On 7th Avenue.” [laughing]

Paul: It’s great for the community.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: No, you’re right. There are jewels, and I think we get to hold on to them.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But, you know, the rest of it is like an enormous strip mall that never, like, that’s—

Rich: It just keeps upgrading on itself. Right? And that’s that. All right, you want to close it with ad….?

Paul: You know, there’s a lot of pretty pictures. There’s a lot of, a lot of the Elon Musk stuff is in here, like, star power. And, you know, there’s also, like, they’re making pretty art with technology and screens.

Rich: That’s cool, yeah.

Paul: It’s all really good. I guess what I would say is every… I think there’s a real fantasy that we all have that we’ve come much further than we have.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I would actually take this as a positive, because right now we’re pretty sure there’s a lot of people who feel that the world’s ending a little bit or a lot. [laughter] Just a little bit or a lot on a lot of different things.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And you could actually say that maybe that’s the inverse. Right now I’m looking at this issue, and there are articles and there are images, computer-generated images that wouldn’t be out of place in a recent issue of WIRED.

Rich: Totally.

Paul: Okay. You’d have to edit, so on and so forth. And so maybe progress isn’t quite as profound as we think it is. I bet most of the people you showed, if you took them and you showed them like a, like an issue WIRED today, they’d find it, if they were reading Omni in 1980, they’d find it pretty recognizable.

Rich: Totally.

Paul: And I think also you could say, “Wait a minute. Things might seem really bad right now, but that’s kind of the status quo, actually, if you take a step back.” It feels bad to me. I don’t like reading the news. There’s a lot of stuff going on. We got Tehran, we got a lot of stuff.

Rich: A lot of stuff.

Paul: But that’s also in some ways the normal passage of the world. And you can learn about where that’s going. And I think, like, that’s what I’m taking out of looking—like, we sat down kind of not with a plan to have fun and frolic.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: But it’s been 45 years since this issue was published and—

Rich: It’s in great shape.

Paul: I take good care of my Omnis.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I actually am not, I don’t cherish books very much, but I do try to take care of these.

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: We trust people, when they come to the office, that they will also take care of them.

Rich: Yes. Yup.

Paul: Leave them out for anyone to page through. But, but I think, like, culture and humanity change a lot more slowly than we’re thinking. And I think we think that social media and AI and so forth are so radical and so disruptive because they do change our lives.

Rich: They do. And the pace of change seems faster and faster.

Paul: But I don’t think when you’re 80, 5 or 6 years from now.

Rich: [whistles]

Paul: Sorry. It was very easy. It was right there. [laughing] When you’re 80, many, many hundreds of years from now, you’re not going to sit there and go, “Boy, that AI transformation was it.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re going to think, “How are my grandkids?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re going to think, “What’s my son up to? He has a weird job. I don’t fully understand. He’s like a bot wrangler. I don’t know what the hell he’s gonna be.” [laughter] But just like every parent, you’re gonna be like, “What are my children doing?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they’ll be using the new tools. And actually, if you squint it’s gonna be really, really legible.

Rich: I think you’re right.

Paul: You’re gonna get it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, whatever comes between now and the next 30, 40, 50 years?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’re gonna be able to look back, just like I can look back at this Omni, and it’s gonna fee pretty familiar. And if you go with the Silicon Valley narrative, they’re like, “No, all computers will be thinking, and we will be on our way to the stars.” Maybe so.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: Maybe so. So I want to just, like, when I’m reading this, it actually gives me a lot of comfort, because we’re building something that’s kind of a compromise between the AI super future and the way—

Rich: It’s a pragmatic approach.

Paul: It honestly would be highly legible to the people who made that IBM ad that we talked about earlier.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: And so, I don’t know. I actually ended up finding this, I didn’t expect to be soothed, but I find this a very calming exercise. Things move very, very quickly, but also simultaneously a lot more slowly than we were expecting.

Rich: I think this is, I think this is, I think this is good advice, because you can fall in the hole.

Paul: I get in the hole. Especially because you hit the AI news, and there’s 40,000 things happening this week.

Rich: A lot happening this week. And there’s also this ominous threat of, like, “Well, you think this is big, Wait till the next one.” And it’s constant. Right?

Paul: It mirrors the world being more of a mess than it was.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But not as—nowhere near as much a mess as it has been, even in the last, like, hundred years.

Rich: That’s right. That’s right.

Paul: So we have to, like, I don’t, I can’t give it—

Rich: I can’t transition to an Aboard bumper ad now.

Paul: We don’t have to. We’re gonna, we’re gonna do an actual—

Rich: No, we’re gonna power through. Check out aboard dot…

Paul: Com. [laughter] You can, well, no, I mean, type stuff into the box. Make a, make a system for planning your whole ruture.

Rich: Or try to fix society. Type that in the box.

Paul: Literally could do that. And it’ll have a response. We can build, I’ve actually—

Rich: It’ll come up with a good Kanban view of fixing humanity.

Paul: Well, and this is for future demos, because this would be way too confusing, but I’ve actually used it with problems like that.

Rich: How’d it go?

Paul: It’s a really good thinking tool.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: I had it. I’m gonna, I’m gonna get real meta. I told AI, I told Aboard, I said, “Please build me a demo of a system to help me manage information for the next 100 million years.”

Rich: How’d that go?

Paul: Incredibly well. [laughter] I’ll do it and we’ll demo it in the future.

Rich: Sounds great.

Paul: It’s really fun. Okay—

Rich: Check it out. Aboard.com. Thanks for listening in our new studio.

Paul: Yeah, I hope everything—

Rich: This was a bit of a philosophical event. I just wrote this week about zooming out and boy, we zoomed out on this podcast as well.

Paul: Well, and actually get ready for a little demo. And we’re also going to do a little AI summer school in the podcast because, you know, people are, we just, we’re going to just have—

Rich: Do a 101.

Paul: We’re going to have a Hot Brain Summer.

Rich: That’s what it’s going to be.

Paul: And subscribe to Omni magazine!

Rich: No, you can’t do that.

Paul: You can’t do that at all.

Rich: You can find, probably find piles of them on eBay, is my guess.

Paul: You can, but they’re not—they’re a little bit of a collector’s item.

Rich: I’m sure.

Paul: So they’re not, they’re not, like, cover price, but they’re not expensive either. I probably spent $100 for 40 of them.

Rich: Oh, that’s great.

Paul: No, it’s not crazy.

Rich: Yeah. Have a lovely week. Take care of yourselves.

Paul: Bye, everyone.

Rich: Bye.

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