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Human Dot AI, by @ajkeen keenon.substack.com/p/human-dot-ai…
“We gave AI a mission to make advertising revenue at all costs. It’s not evil. It just doesn’t care.” — @joemarchese
I’ve always been skeptical about the H word — “human”. Especially these days. In our AI age it’s lost its meaning. Today, it’s just another sloppy way of saying good. Being human equals not being a fascist. The word might have been invented by a bot.
So I was intrigued by today’s guest, who seems to be cornering the market in humanness. Former advertising executive Joe Marchese is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, wears a Human or Nothing hat, and has a new book entitled Human Dot AI. He got to the H word early, he confesses, naming his firm ten years ago, when humans were just human and machines were machines.
Marchese’s argument in Human Dot AI is less sentimental than his branding.
Nick Bostrom’s dystopian AI paperclip machine, he reminded me, wasn’t evil. We told it to make paperclips and it accomplished that mission. Similarly, over the last twenty-five years, in our Web 2.0 age of Google and Facebook, we’ve handed AI the mission of making advertising revenue at all costs. And it did exactly that with our news feeds, our recommended videos, our information diet.
“It’s not evil,” the former Fox advertising chief told me about AI. “It just doesn’t care.”
So now in our post-Web 2.0 age, he says, we are at another fork. Your AI agent is supposed to work for you. Which, in the real (i.e. legal) world, indicates fiduciary duty. What happens when that agent — or, at least, its human owner — is quietly taking a cut for every advertisement the AI serves us?
“Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan reminds us. So who will your agent serve?
“We gave AI a mission to make advertising revenue at all costs. It’s not evil. It just doesn’t care.” — @joemarchese
I’ve always been skeptical about the H word — “human”. Especially these days. In our AI age it’s lost its meaning. Today, it’s just another sloppy way of saying good. Being human equals not being a fascist. The word might have been invented by a bot.
So I was intrigued by today’s guest, who seems to be cornering the market in humanness. Former advertising executive Joe Marchese is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, wears a Human or Nothing hat, and has a new book entitled Human Dot AI. He got to the H word early, he confesses, naming his firm ten years ago, when humans were just human and machines were machines.
Marchese’s argument in Human Dot AI is less sentimental than his branding.
Nick Bostrom’s dystopian AI paperclip machine, he reminded me, wasn’t evil. We told it to make paperclips and it accomplished that mission. Similarly, over the last twenty-five years, in our Web 2.0 age of Google and Facebook, we’ve handed AI the mission of making advertising revenue at all costs. And it did exactly that with our news feeds, our recommended videos, our information diet.
“It’s not evil,” the former Fox advertising chief told me about AI. “It just doesn’t care.”
So now in our post-Web 2.0 age, he says, we are at another fork. Your AI agent is supposed to work for you. Which, in the real (i.e. legal) world, indicates fiduciary duty. What happens when that agent — or, at least, its human owner — is quietly taking a cut for every advertisement the AI serves us?
“Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan reminds us. So who will your agent serve?
keenon.substack.com Human Dot AI Episode 3093: Joe Marchese on Who Your AI Agent Really Serves 0:53
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