Genuinely Artificial

You know, as a branding guy, I've been around a for quite a while. I've seen a lot of stuff come and go. Some incredible brilliance. Some unbelievable stupidity. I've lived through so many fads and frauds that sometimes I feel the events of my life were more fiction than fact. So many Next Big Things that swamped the media, bamboozled investors, and pumped and dumped more worthless stock than you can shake a ledger at.

The first big wave was software. It was the early 1990s, when personal computers were still new, and most early adopters were writing their own code, line by line. There was no internet, just boxes of "floppy disks" with new, pre-written software to process your words, or if you were really avant-garde, balance your checkbook. In those days, everyone wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next big software offering. Silicone Valley wasn't yet widely known, but San Jose and thereabouts was where digital rags to riches stories were being born.

At that time, the media was all about software princes like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and their ilk, writing them up as the Henry Fords and Thomas Edisons of a new generation. The one thing the media never talked about was the venture capital funds on Sandhill Road, who bought those kids' souls with truckloads of cash in the hopes their companies would go public, soaring to ridiculous valuations so that the venture guys would cash out before the companies died at the hands of retail reality.

It was commonly known that venture firms expected to make twenty times their investment on each company in which they invested, figuring that nineteen in twenty would likely fail. And since they took controlling interests, they pretty much decided who lived and died, financially speaking. So companies like Microsoft, Oracle -- and with a lot of struggle, Apple -- made incredible fortunes while sporting hugely unrealistic valuations: For a minute there, Qualcomm even broke the $1000 per share barrier.

But the software market eventually became saturated, and the venture capitalists needed a new source of suckery. That's when, in 1998, the internet came of age. All you have to do is replace the word "software" above with "dot com" and you'll see the exact same story unfolding throughout the late 1990s and into the new millennium. The only difference was that the stakes were way higher: instead of inventors making millions, they were raking in billions. The needy and greedy got stung by the "dot com bubble," in which hundreds of high-flying start ups got eviscerated about three minutes after they hit the market. All the dopes who felt they missed out of the software craze went broke after margin calls destroyed their overloaded positions in venture-pumped internet fantasies.

Not too long after that came the social media wave. Punks like Marc Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel founded companies like Facebook, Ebay and PayPal. Deals were happening faster, managed by people with established connections. Billions of digital money was sitting around in money markets just waiting for the next pump and dump scheme. Everything from search engines to social media was hyped as the Next Big Thing, with the same press releases and media hype that propelled software a decade earlier.

After the bulk of social media startups evaporated, along came mobile apps. Same venture funds, same wunderkinds, same pumps, same dumps. The promise of the world on your phone allowed high schoolers to squeeze more millions out of their ideas than pimples on their faces. And as you can tell by know, a few apps soared while most others swan-dived straight into the meat grinder.

Next Big Thing of the moment: artificial intelligence.

Let me start by stating that AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. In the same way that "the cloud" is just someone else's hard drive with a fancy new name, artificial intelligence is simply ultra-fast computing. It can't invent anything. It can't make subjective judgments. In fact, it really only does one thing: it gathers and analyzes pre-existing data really, really fast. But to hear the media hype it, artificial intelligence is going to become our digital overlords, throwing everyone out of work while making stuff really fast and cheap.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And to prove it, I asked Grok, X's artificial intelligence service, to tell me all about -- you guessed it -- me. It took Grok about one minute and twenty-seven second to gather up and summarize everything about me (you can read it here, if you're interested). It sure looked like a meaty summary of who I am and what I do. But a quick read revealed there was a glaring problem with it: Everything it wrote was the sum total of all the hype I'd smeared around the internet during decades of my career. There was no objective analysis. No verification. No questioning of facts. Just pure, unadulterated regurgitation of stuff that I and everyone else had written about me.

So even though you may think I'm an angel, there's a whole lot about me that might no be so wonderful, none of which can be found by artificial intelligence. And that's hardly a source I -- or anyone else -- could trust.

And that's about all artificial intelligence can do. Despite that limitation, all the usual suspects are lining up to invest and pump the Next Big Thing because that's how they make their money. This is the fourth time in as many decades that the Silicone Valley boys are pulling the digital wool over the eyes of the American public, and a lot of people are falling for it.

Look, I'm not selling artificial intelligence short. It has its place in military and tactical weaponry, for example. But it's going to be a long, long time before artificial intelligence can fix that leak under your sink or write the Great American Novel. Not gonna happen. What is gonna happen is a lot of talking heads yapping about how artificial intelligence is going to be The Next Big Thing.

And if history is any indication, a whole lot of suckers are going to believe it.