From Sherwood News (Robinhood Markets, Inc. subsidiary), June 3:
NO MORE WORLDS LEFT TO CONQUER
Tech’s biggest businesses have stopped growing. AI can’t solve that for them.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more of the web’s biggest brands are seeing a steep decline in traffic. What happened to the futures they promised?
I believe we're at the end of what I call the Rot-Com boom: the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle, where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas, that it felt like every tech company could experience endless growth.
And it explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve gotten tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing.
This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. The tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive.
Over the past decade, we’ve been sold ideas about technologies that were going to change our lives but somehow haven’t moved the needle. We were told that NFTs would replace physical, tangible collectibles. That cryptocurrency would replace regular money. That we would eventually live in a metaverse. Here’s where we are: the NFT market crumbled in 2022. Cryptocurrency is nowhere near universal. And the metaverse is a laughably wonky virtual-reality space that Mark Zuckerberg, as of 2022, had burned $36 billion to make.
Over the past decade, we’ve been sold ideas about technologies that were going to change our lives but somehow haven’t moved the needle.Today we're told that our glorious AI-powered future is imminent, yet what we actually have is unprofitable, unsustainable generative AI that has an acute issue with spitting out incorrect information. At the forefront of the AI boom is Sam Altman's $80 billion juggernaut, OpenAI, a company that says it will build "artificial general intelligence" that experiences human-like cognition, an idea that is simply not possible based on how generative AI works. Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the AI technology he’s now plugged into his search engine is “an inherent feature” despite its proclivity to generate hilariously incorrect "answers" to queries based on hilariously incorrect "answers" to queries based on the links of a decaying search engine.
It’s getting worse. Windows laptops will soon integrate an AI-powered "Recall" feature that allows you to search everything you've done on your computer for the past three months, recording everything from the meetings you've been in to the things you've written — a feature nobody asked for and that inherently encroaches on the user’s privacy, as it involves taking screenshots of the user’s machine every few seconds.
It seems as if every major tech company is "integrating AI" into their products and services, yet underneath the hood the "AI" they're integrating doesn't seem to do anything new, or solve any particular need, or even generate a profit. Even the companies themselves seem incapable of explaining why AI is such a big deal, to the point that Microsoft's Super Bowl commercial for its OpenAI-powered CoPilot assistant featured multiple things that it can't actually do, like generate the code for a 3D open-world game.
The tech industry is remarkably good at coming up with both innovative products and ways to turn them into huge new markets for hyper growth: search engines, digital maps, smartphones and apps, social media, cloud computing, software as a service, electric cars, streaming audio and video. Since 2008, the number of people who use the internet has nearly tripled. There were obvious, meaningful markets to move into — ways to connect people, ways to get people the content they wanted, ways to sell people things that solved problems that were important to solve and solvable.
The tech industry’s flywheel is slowing down
Tech has perpetually succeeded at building things new things that neatly create new markets, and incentivized — in the private and public markets — growing companies as fast and as big as possible to dominate these markets, with the assumption that there would always be more massive, multibillion- or multitrillion-dollar markets to conquer in the future.
Between 2022 and 2023, only 100 million additional people got online, the slowest rate of growth in the past 18 years. And that’s despite the ongoing need to bring connectivity to the masses — particularly those in the Global South — a problem that has yet to be solved as the most recent figures from the UN’s International Telecommunication Union shows, with 33% of the world’s population (or 2.6 billion people) having never used the internet....
....MUCH MORE
