The Island Underground Radio Station

WVVY in Martha’s Vineyard – photo Robyn Twomey

This is a bit of a departure, but I figured I’d let you all know about a piece I wrote that was just published in our local paper. It covers a quirky underground radio station I stumbled across some years back. You can find the online piece here, and below is an excerpt:

Every Islander knows the drill: stuck in a line of traffic, slowly navigating one of the inescapable left-turn-fueled bottlenecks that bedevil our Island. Bored and possibly annoyed, we turn to our radios, hoping for a distraction to help pass the time.

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The Web We Want Vs. The Web We Have

The Warrant for the Town of Oak Bluffs, MA.

Are you frustrated with how the internet works?

Me too. Today I’m going to think out loud about why.

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First Person Singularities, Epistemic Supply Chains, and Load Bearing Euphemisms: An Interview with Claude.ai

Big dreams.

I woke this morning to news that OpenAI plans on growing its advertising business from zero to more than $100 billion in the next four years. If that sounds utterly bonkers to you, well, you’re not alone.

For OpenAI to accomplish such a monumental task, it would have to leverage the database of intentions in ways that would make the assumptions inherent to today’s internet advertising landscape seem quaintly non-intrusive.

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The Withline

 

The Withline

I spend a lot of time engaged in the craft of writing – I’ve penned more than 1.5 million words on Searchblog alone. Writing anchors nearly all my projects, from teaching at universities to my board and investing work, not to mention the hundreds of pieces I’ve either authored or edited at places like P&G Signal and DOC. I write a few pages nearly every day in longhand journal (I’ve filled nearly 30 of them over the past four decades), and I recently embarked on a long-form writing project that may (or may not) produce another book over the coming months.

So writing matters to me, and I’ll admit I’m uncomfortable with how generative AI is changing my chosen field. I recoil from the idea of AI-written articles, blog posts, or academic assignments. And I support the various efforts by authors, journalism institutions, and creative groups who are pushing back against what feels like wholesale theft of our work to train LLMs.

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Product, Platform, Interface, Medium, Language: What Is AI?

Thanks, Marshall.

What is AI?

I’ve been struggling with this rather basic question for several years now, so today I figured I’d write out loud about it, and see if anything coherent surfaces.

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Rebel, King, and Tyrant: Apple at 50

Wired, 1997: We were genuinely worried the company would go out of business.

Apple turns 50 years old tomorrow. I’ve been using its products for 48 of those years.

48 years. Over those five decades, my relationship with Apple has shifted as dramatically as its market cap. And not, I am afraid, in a good way.

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We Dream of Genies, But Will Big Tech Let Us Use Them?

Last night I dreamt I was merging onto a rushing freeway. My on-ramp was far too short, a concrete embankment hemmed me in to the right. Faceless, speeding vehicles filled the lanes; integrating with them would require icy determination and perfectly executed timing. Missing the merge would bring certain death. The dream began after the point of no return – I was already accelerating into the flow, braking was not an option.

Do, or die.

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How Long Will Your Claw Be Open?

Try me, then you’ll buy me.

It’s “phase two” of the AI boom, and the claws are out.

Back at the tail end of 2024, I wrote these words: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.  As the bloom came off the Generative AI rose in 2024, everyone started talking about AI agents as the Next Big Thing. Google, Apple, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon – all of them (and about a million startups) are trying to build user agents for both enterprise and consumer use cases. I’m a huge fan of the concept, but for now, it remains just that. Reasoning agents that book your travel, negotiate your insurance bills, or manage your calendar simply will not work if they are beholden to the same business models currently driving Big Tech.”

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Will Anthropic Pivot to Consumer?

I was going to write a long piece on the implications of the ongoing cage match between Anthropic and the US government, but as I dug into the research, I realized that hot takes on subjects this complicated rarely add much value to the debate. I’m going to let things cool a bit and take another run at it down the road.

But something important kept tugging at me as I was reading up on what I believe is the most significant regulatory action ever taken in the tech industry (if you believe listing a major US company as a “supply chain risk” is NOT government regulation, you’re fooling yourself).

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I’m Sorry, LinkedIn!

I’m sorry, LinkedIn!

Earlier this week, as a major storm took aim at the little island where I live, I saw a story in which Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, defended his company’s energy use by comparing it to how much energy humans use to do similar tasks.

“…it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” he argued, when asked about AI’s insatiable – and destructive – appetite for energy. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

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