Move Fast and Break Things

And other stupid phrases....

Since writing this article the Trump administration is intending to pass a bill removing all guardrails on AI in a bid to beat China in the AI Cold Wars. Unlike the West, China has no need to broadcast their progress. They serviced American businesses with cheap labor, then turned the tables on them - they will do the same thing with AI. Here’s the original article:

A wise friend once said karma is spelled two ways: K-A-R-M-A and S-T-U-P-I-D. It’s sadly funny and at the same time accurate. It’s one of the reasons why I like watching stand-up comedy on a Friday night. Through observation, good stand-up comedians often speak what Buddhists call relative truth, and they show us how to laugh at life, to lighten things up a bit. Hopefully, wokeness won’t kill the comic! And before anyone leaps to the wrong conclusion that I must be an anti-woke (or anti-tech) conservative, let me be clear that I am neither a democratic, a republican nor an independent, politically speaking. I do however, try to side with the truth no matter who speaks it. That of course can make me appear ‘disloyal,’ but I have no interest in loyalty to anyone’s ego, including my own. I only have loyalty to the truth or at least my attempt at finding it.

I am writing this article after a conversation I had several weeks ago with someone on the subject of AI, technology in general, and because more recently I watched Big Vape on Netflix about the rise and fall of Juul. There is a lot to unpack here, talking of other stupid phrases - as you can probably tell I am not a fan of jargon. I don’t like using the latest corporate catchphrases like sustainability, scaleability, carbon offset and ecosystems etc, not to mention the plethora of psychobabble speak from gaslighting to bread-crumbing that have entered into popular culture. As a young assistant brand manager I wanted to vomit when I first heard a senior advertising executive, dressed head-to-toe in Armani and de rigueur tortoise shell rimmed spectacles, bang on about “The brand being the hero.” It sounded as stupid back then as it does today. I also had a boss who taught me only to use marketing language my grandmother could understand. He also had a habit of getting out his calculator at advertising agency production meetings to figure out how many washing machines he could buy for the production budget of a 30-second commercial - it’s a lot, in case you’re wondering. But that’s a Yorkshireman for you. He brought things crashing down to earth in real, relatable, layman’s terms.

Anyway, I digress. During my conversation on AI, I had expressed a concern that few AI tech companies were thinking long thoughts about the consequences of where this technology might take humanity. The response I got was “Yes, but we cannot let China win.” But win at what? Domination over a questionable technology? Profit? Becoming the next trillion dollar business or billionaire tech media mogul with a lobotomized personality or APDD (Adult Personality Deficit Disorder)? Did we not learn anything from the nuclear arms race or the environmental catastrophes that have plagued nuclear fission? And why do we always need to make up a common enemy to unite, and in some more recent cases divide, a nation? The bottom line is, we need better leaders with REAL leadership skills, not just people who want ‘power’ and more money than they know what to do with.

Leadership, with a double-edged Sword

In the Aesop’s fable, The Tortoise and the Hare, the hare tears off at a clip and confident that he can outpace the tortoise and win, lies down for a nap at which point the slow but steady tortoise lumbers past and crosses the finish line first. It is a good lesson with many different interpretations, but in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, the hares no longer lie down for a nap. America, in particular, is an Adderall nation, up all night, amped up on Amphetamines and set on winning at any cost. Having been involved in the naming of a good few brands and corporations in my marketing days, I cannot help but muse over the fact that Adderall sounds very similar to the word “addled.” I wonder if anyone mentioned that around the boardroom table when the name was selected as the best option that brand management had come up with. A good inside joke, perhaps, when the billions of dollars rolled in from high school students dealing Adderall on the playground during recess.

In a recent NPR interview, the CEO of Inflection AI and previous co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman, said that (and I’m paraphrasing) AI could be legislated and regulated for safety much like the airlines have been for decades. It’s a comforting thought, but air travel did not outpace a government’s ability to legislate and it created a body called the FAA to do just that, originally called the Air Commerce Act which came into being on May, 20th, 1926 - the first self-propelled flight took off and landed on December 17th, 1903, just 23 years before. The tech industry, decades after the invention of the internet, answers to no one and never has (see postscript for my comments on Biden's Executive Order). Generative AI is accelerating at such a rapid pace no government could possibly legislate at that speed, without using generative AI to create legislation for itself, which is nothing short of a very dangerous form of self-regulation.

The tech industry, and they are by no means alone, has always been duplicitous. It hides behind a do-good, connect-the-world-platform while addicting people to its products and selling their data to advertisers - I would love to have seen that amount of direct honesty written into the executive summaries of their business plans. And while I have no doubt it has connected people, without a positive USP they would have had no users to exploit. In many respects it is a case of legalized bait and switch. Although it feels a bit passé to mention these days, the tech industry has always referred to its customers as “users,” in the same manner to which drug users are referred - at what point does an internet user become an addict and therefore an internet abuser?

Now combine the tech industry with another duplicitous industry, tobacco, and you had the perfect storm brewing on the horizon. A couple of ex-Stanford grads wanted to solve the global nicotine addiction problem and created Juul. It sounded like a fine idea, but in reality what comes to mind is the phrase: “Good intentions pave the way to hell.” And it’s worth noting that tobacco was an industry already in sharp decline, that is, until vaping came along. If the documentary Big Vape is even close to being accurate, those intentions quickly went south when Juul struck advertising gold with an ad and social media campaign that set the brand on fire and skyrocketed sales, primarily in the underage, teen market. A big no-no for which the tobacco industry got a spanked wrist from mommy and daddy Congress. Having written my fair share of creative briefs for ad agencies, it is inconceivable to me that the founders, investors and Juul’s own sales and marketing team didn’t raise a hand or start frantically waving red flags when their advertising guru presented his storyboard ideas on his proposed campaign. Someone - anyone - should have, maybe, I don’t know, perhaps mentioned that the campaign was so far off-strategy that it wasn’t just NOT in the same ballpark, it wasn't even on the same planet. It was so clearly designed to make Juul fashionable amongst a young, trendy audience and had little to nothing (and that’s being generous) to do with helping traditional cigarette users quit their addiction. Juul’s vaping device, a high yield nicotine delivery system, was intentionally designed to be sleek, with a Steve Jobs’ Apple-style design, which to many was not only visually appealing but also highly concealable, didn’t smell like tobacco in the classroom and you could vape like a chain-smoker without needing an ashtray, as a stinky reminder of how many cancer-sticks you were inhaling on a daily basis.

Crypocurrency, apparently a tech term for Ponzi scheme, is another industry case in point. An industry, ill-conceived and run by millennials who know how to code, while playing video games from their beanbags, along with their investors who don’t know how to code but do know how to make spaghetti. Why the spaghetti reference? Because the once cautious VC (Venture Capital) industry seems to have thrown caution to the wind, en masse, like Lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs, when it comes to investing in tech - and the more shabbily dressed, socially awkward their founders, the better. Apparently it’s the new, unwashed behind the ears, sign of genius. Their current strategy appears to be: invest (relatively small amounts, which equates to a lot of washing machines) in as many tech companies and app developers as possible, hoping one will stick like the old spaghetti test and become the next Facebook or Instagram. Sequoia Capital, who invested hundreds of millions in Sam Bankman-Freid’s FTX, claimed to have done extensive and comprehensive due diligence on FTX, prior to the company “suddenly” going rogue. But according to FTX’s interim CEO, John Ray, who helped out after the Enron scandal, he had never seen “such an utter failure of corporate controls at every level of an organization.” Many on Capitol Hill (US lawmakers, lest we forget) were also apparently aware of the legal issues surrounding FTX, long before its collapse, but as significant donors on both sides of the aisle, there was little appetite to curb any enthusiasm and support for the young SBF, who apparently likes his toast buttered on both sides. FTX’s corporate accounts were also kept on Quickbooks. Did Sequoia even see those Quickbooks ledgers/balance sheets? Surely had they done any due diligence at all they would have and would that not have raised a serious red flag or at least an eyebrow or two? If you’re investing hundreds of millions of dollars into a single, fledging entity in a fledgling industry surely part of your due diligence would be/should be to send in a team of forensic accountants and if you’re refused access then that should be evidence enough. This was a multibillion dollar exchange that was keeping its accounts on a cheap piece of software which can be purchased at Staples and what’s more the company (FTX) had never been audited - not that auditing is necessarily a reflection of sound accounting as the late Arthur Andersen can attest. Sequoia did apologize to its investors, so that’s okay! And as an aside, SBF’s lawyers have recently asked the judge in his fraud and money laundering trial to approve an increase in the dosage of his prescription Adderall. For a deeper read on this, I highly recommended Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman’s book “Easy Money.”

Everyone is down on Big Oil these days with the “Just Stop Oil” campaign. Apparently, it is a movement! Although I am not sure how they move in order to get to their destinations - at which they sometimes glue themselves to priceless pieces of art in museums - except by oil polluting trains, planes and automobiles. I’ve never seen them arrive by bicycle and perhaps someone should educate them on how glue is made, too. I particularly liked the story of the German protestors who glued themselves to the floor of a VW car dealership - this is comedy gold! Come closing time, the staff turned off the lights and heating and locked up. So the story goes, the protestors were upset that they were left in the freezing cold and dark all night, and were not left any means, by the staff, of going the bathroom. Not even a pot to piss in - these organizers don’t seem to be very well organized. And when they ordered pizza the delivery driver couldn’t get in because the doors were locked. The article I read didn’t specify if the protestors had ordered an EV (electric car, if you’re my age) delivery from their phone apps or whether the vehicle was gas powered. They should have, at the very least, been grateful that the VW staff were conscientious enough to switch off the lights and heating to conserve energy, while the dealership was closed for business. Many of these often tech-obsessed millennial protestors fail to recognize that some of the biggest, singular energy users are the tech firms themselves. Bitcoin mines, for example, use vast amounts of water to cool their systems and fossil fuel energy to power them. These “mines” are vast buildings often built on cheap land in Texas where water resources are limited. EV’s, while supposedly good for the local environment in which they are driven, are nevertheless highly polluting where heavy battery metals are mined (not in my backyard, so that’s okay) and because those batteries make the cars significantly heavier they are prone to leave more rubber and synthetic polymer pollution in the atmosphere than a regular gas powered vehicle. Local governments in the UK are now using environmental concerns as a means of ‘taxing’ drivers with older vehicles. If you don’t have an EV, parking will often cost you significantly more than a wealthier person with a newer, more environmentally-friendly vehicle. Drive into another city in an older vehicle (and it doesn't need to be very old) and the local city council will track you with CCTV, identify you and your vehicle and send out an automatic bill to your home address for over £100, for having the audacity to drive such a polluting piece of crap into their citadel. Apparently, green does indeed beget green.

So, where am I going with all this, you may well ask? The answer is in the title: Move Fast and Break Things. A phrase which I believe was first coined by Facebook’s (now Meta’s) Mark Zuckerberg. A phrase which has been readily adopted by an entire tech industry and their pasta-making investors, which has in-turn spawned an array of tech-driven companies hellbent on disrupting every industry they can, no matter the consequences. Watch out, food is next - space age diets fed to you in smart, sleek-looking, refillable titanium pills, captured and recycled in a new industry of sleek, shit-sifting, shit-analyzing shit-houses (that’s a toilet if you’re not British) with built-in AI doctors, whisking you off your ET (electronic toilet) and away in a driverless EV to the ER when it detects an irregular whiff - a whiff the tech industry will vehemently deny is from them, because they don’t have stools, they have beanbags.

My question is why does Big Tech get such a big pass? Of course, part of the answer is the US is terrified of regulating industries that attract investors and Big Tech has built companies that in my corporate days would have been inconceivably large and unimaginably profitable. And everything is going online, so restrict and regulate tech, you restrict investment and therefore commerce itself - and we can’t let China win, can we?

While the tech industry is itself cautioning restraint on generative AI, I don’t quite believe that fits with their move fast and break things ethos. It is in fact in direct conflict with it. And once they have disrupted society to the point of no return, they will of course rebrand the next phase of tech takeover as “Re-generative AI” to correct the broken things of the past they moved too fast to care about or consider.

I will concede that not all technology is bad. Much of it has been and still is very useful, the wheel being one! My concern is that Big Tech, unlike technology in bygone eras is becoming all-encompassing. It is infiltrating every part of society to the point of total reliance and it will only become more so. Meaning every facet of existing and living in our future societies will be a money-making vehicle for tech.

It should never be a race to dominance and profit, but the building of a civilized society that is in harmony with itself and its environment that matters. Instead of Move Fast and Break Things, we need to conceive of and build things more thoughtfully.

P.S. since publication of this article today, The White House, this same morning, announced an Executive Order to oversee the development of AI to ensure its safety prior to roll-out. You can read the EO here:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/10/30/fact-sheet-president-biden-issues-executive-order-on-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence/

However, as AI is generative i.e. self-learning, I am not convinced that the Executive Order will do much to curb its self-propelling progress or is really even designed to do anything but pay lip-service to a growing concern. The Biden Administration’s Chief of Staff, Jeff Zients, said “We have to move as fast, if not faster than the technology itself.” Good luck with that, Jeff - no napping, please, so don’t forget your Adderall. Oh and how is “The Zuck” these days? As we have seen with so many Federal Agencies such as the FDA, powerful corporations can fast-track approval on, for example, pharmaceutical drugs without third-party testing or oversight and then of course there is the ubiquitous ‘revolving door’ of executives moving fluidly between government agencies and corporate boardrooms. So why would AI oversight be any different, particularly as some of the agencies involved in offering “guidance” on these issue e.g. The National Institute of Standards and Technology are not regulatory agencies? I don’t mean to sound cynical, but, I’m not buying it, and until we see the end of corporate money and their lobbyists funding politics most of these issues will remain steadfastly problematic and S-T-U-P-I-D.

For more articles on AI and other subjects, see below.

Gavin J. Chalcraft is an artist and CEO/Executive Producer at Golden Ratio Media Group, a film, television, and theatre production company. Prior to working in the arts, he owned and ran Isosceles Consulting, a global brand development and management consulting firm.

*** Gavin Chalcraft and Golden Ratio Media Group, Inc. strictly prohibits the use of any generative AI software to upload and analyze any material attached to or contained in these Substack posts. ***