Hello User Friendly fans! This week, we’re going to try something a little different — and a little bloggy. As you’ve surely noticed, I include a roundup of what’s happening in the tech world in every edition of the newsletter, but there’s usually a lot of really interesting but less newsy stuff left open in my tabs. If I still tweeted, these would be links I’d post with some navel-gazey commentary. Instead, I’m offering up those links and thoughts to you!
I
Let’s start with AI. I know, I know, it’s impossible to talk about technology today without hearing about AI. Especially lately, as OpenAI celebrates the three-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s paradigm-shifting public release. The Atlantic recently ran a series pegged to the anniversary, and Lila Shroff’s dispatch on the people who are “outsourcing their thinking to AI” is a fascinating read. It’s about people who’ve become accidentally dependent on ChatGPT or Claude. (I riffed on this idea in a recent Vox video.) These tools are useful, but like many things online, they’re addictive by design. They’re also not as intelligent as they seem.
The technology is built to interpret prompts and generate language, as Benjamin Riley explains in a recent essay on the Verge. It’s very tempting to believe that generative AI tools are thinking, especially because so-called thinking or reasoning models narrate what appears to be a thought process. But it’s only mimicry. (You can read more about the differences between AI and human cognition on Riley’s Substack.) So as much as tech CEOs, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, want you to believe that super intelligence is right around the corner, we’ll need another paradigm shift in AI before we’re closer to a system that’s actually intelligent.
II
You could say that AI as we know it is simply better software. But that overlooks the actual hardware leaps needed to make that software work. The AI boom as we know it is actually driven by billions of dollars in hardware investments: namely, data centers full of increasingly powerful chips. The fervor reminds me of the early days of Silicon Valley and, even further back, the heyday of Bell Labs in New Jersey.
There are two books that will help you better understand the moment we’re living through. One is Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. It tells the story of the invention of the transistor and the visionary scientists who laid the groundwork for the technology-centric world we live in today, including Claude Shannon, also known as the father of information theory, and Bill Shockley, who won a Nobel Prize for his role in inventing the transistor. It was Shockley who moved to California, near his mother’s house in Palo Alto, and started the first company making silicon-based semiconductor devices.
If you fast-forward slightly, you’ll get to the period John Markoff covers in his history of Silicon Valley, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. In sharp contrast to the horn-rimmed glasses-wearing nerds from Bell Labs, the generation that turned transistor technology into devices the entire family could use were hippies, hackers, and acid droppers. That seemingly leftist mindset led not just to innovation but also, unexpectedly, to the tremendously profitable and powerful tech industry that resides in and around Palo Alto today. You could also argue that ethos led to techno-libertarianism, which is the subject of the book that’s next on my list: Cyberselfish.
III
Did you know that kids in China use smartwatches for everything, including social mobility? I had no idea until I read Stephanie Yang’s Wired report on how parents are buying smartwatches for kids as young as 5, in part to track their locations but also to set them up with a way to pay for things and connect with their peers. The leading kids’ smartwatch-maker, Xiaotiancai, or Little Genius in English, has found a way to gamify just about everything. Kids earn experience points that help them earn status, and they can send points to friends as a sort of social currency. (If you want to go deeper into this phenomenon, check out the coverage on Calling the Shots, a Substack written by Ivy Chang.)
What’s happening in China feels like a cautionary tale for parents here in the United States. As fears of brain rot (and other bad things) make parents increasingly nervous about giving their kids smartphones, smartwatches have become a popular go-between. With an Apple Watch or even a smartwatch designed specifically for kids, parents can call or text their kids and, yes, track their every move — all without the perils of granting them full access to the internet. The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost recently argued that all parents should get their kids a watch. Maybe he missed the Wired piece.
—Adam Clark Estes, senior technology correspondent
