Well, I'm not trying to explain the state of the science and the engineering, but to work out what this means to everyone else. There are no products to analyse yet - which is part of the problem.
ChatGPT got to 100m users much faster than anything else because it's riding on all the infrastructure we already built in the last 20 years. To a consumer, it's 'just' a website, and you don't have to wait for telcos to build broadband networks or get everyone to buy a $600 smartphone.
But, most people go to the website and say 'well, that's very cool, but I don't know what I'd use it for'. It's very useful for coding and marketing, and a few general purposes, but it isn't - YET - very helpful for most of the things that most people do all day. A lot of the presentation is wondering about this.
I tried to capture this on the last slide before the conclusion - maybe all AI questions have one of two answers - "no-one knows" or "it will be the same as the last time"
Nokia thought that phones would be like cars. Most car companies have dozens of models with different characteristics and prices, and that's fine. Even BMW has 20(!) top-level model categories. Nokia was selling devices all the way from high-end camera/phones for $$$ right down to $10 (unsubsidised) with two week battery life for emerging markets. I think you can argue that 50 was too many, but 10 or 20 was reasonable and still is - plenty of successful Android OEMs have ranges like that.
The real shift in phone design and in the range was that the screen took over the whole front of the device. That meant there was much less scope for different shapes and form-factors, and since you were no longer using most of the front for casing and keys there was less to design anyway.
Meanwhile all the actual phones ran either Series 40, the classic feature phone OS that won them half the entire market as 'easy to use', or series 60, the smartphone OS, that was an actual platform but problematic (and fragmented) in lots of ways.
Your proposed solution is an insecure system that can and almost certainly will be hacked. That’s the point. You could make insecure encryption pretty easily. What you can’t do is make something that is secure and yet also has a key that gets handed out all over the place. In the last decade alone, there have been all sorts of examples of exactly these kind of security keys being leaked.
Google News is tiny and irrelevant - that's not what the law is about.
Again - do you really think that if you do a web search, and one of the results goes to a newspaper, then the newspaper should get paid? And none of the other links?
Thea's a lot of rhetoric, so let's get really specific about how these laws are supposed to work.
You do a search. You get ten blue links. One of them is to a newspaper website. Google has to pay that website - but not any of the other 9 websites.
You see a cool web page. You post a link on Facebook for your friends and say 'hey, read this!" If it's a link to a newspaper, but not to any other kind of website, Facebook has to pay them.
Google and Facebook not 'co-opting their content.' You need to be really clear about this - we are talking about links. In Meta's case it might be a link posted by the newspaper itself.
Let's extend the principle here: someone posted a link to my website on Hackernews - so Hackernews has to pay me. Really? They post it on Reddit and Reddit has ads, so I get a percentage of the ad revenue. Really??
Originally, the EU had one paragraph on this. That paragraph literally said that you had to let 'any' third party interconnect. That turned into a separate 50 page draft once messaging people explained that 'any' meant spam farms and Chinese intelligence agencies, and a bunch of other stuff besides.
If you give the key to every government that demands it (USA, UK, France, Germany, Japan... ), and every agency (CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, DEA...) then how long will that remain secure? The key will leak and then you have no security.
I am not a cryptographer, but the standard objection to this is that the NSA key will leak, either generally or be stolen by a Russian/Chinese agent.
And in implementation, how many keys are we talking about? USA, UK, France, Germany, USA, Australia... Every country's law enforcement will demand a key, and how long will that remain secure?
William Gibson described 'capitalist dystopia'. The UK has a very strong, active and centralised state - indeed much more so than the USA. It presumes that healthcare is free, that everyone has access to education, that everyone is entitled to a social security safety net, and a whole bunch more besides.
As I said, sometimes the job goes different people in different places, and there’s always frictional pain in the adjustment
On the other hand, you are correct that I didn’t post data saying that unemployment hasn’t fallen, but then that is self-evident. We do not have 50% unemployment now because machines took half the jobs, and we are all of us vastly more prosperous than we were in 1800 or 1900 - again, I don’t think I need to post a chart to the obvious.
This list is shadow IT, which means the things that the corporate IT department isn't paying for and often doesn't even know about. The tools you mention are in the Productiv (and Okta) data in a different category.
Google and Meta (or Twitter or anyone else) don't 'borrow' them. Websites explicitly declare what image and snippet they want anyone to use to summarise a link in the metadata on the web page. it's a choice by newspapers to place that image and text below the link.
It was $600 without a telco subsidy, which was a mistake, and one reason the first model really didn't sell. Then it went to $200 with subsidy in the USA (more complicated elsewhere). I presume you know that '$0' feature phone was actually $100 or so but subsidised to $0.
If you look at the chart in the essay, you'll see that though there were lots of what I called 'proto-smartphones' before the iPhone, and enthusiasts (like me!) loved them, the actual user base was tiny. SMS was huge, MMS was a rounding error and very few people were doing anything else. I was a mobile analyst - I even went to the actual S60 launch event where the Nokia 7650 was announced - and then worked at a telco, and I wrote some more about this a few years ago. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/2/19/mobile-sma...
(Also, Blackberry was big for UK teenaged girls due to free BBM)
"where the iPhone was a more-or-less drop-in replacement for the phone you already had, nine years after Meta bought Oculus, VR is still a new device and a new category for almost everyone. Indeed, the Vision Pro actually looks a bit more like the original Macintosh, which was over $7,000 (adjusted for inflation) when it launched in 1984, and most people didn’t know why they needed one."
Today in the UK Post Office database scandal: this support engineer spent an hour looking at an error report, couldn’t see anything obviously causing it, and so decided it was OK to go to court and testify in a criminal trial that they were sure there were no bugs and the user was a thief.
Back-story - Fujitsu built a database for the UK Post Office that had bugs that led to cash balances disappearing. They refused to accept there could be any bugs, and the Post Office prosecuted hundreds of people over the 'missing' money. There were suicides.
If you 'know' that, you're wrong. Frankly, this is a classist prejudice with no basis in fact.
My boarding school had 700 names on the memorial to WW1. Mostly junior officers: 200 captains and 340 lieutenants. That's out of a cohort of maybe 3500 old boys who were the right age for the front: 20%. Eton itself says 1200 died and 5600 served.
They all volunteered, and the 18 year olds were mostly made second Lieutenants, and the second Lieutenant's job was to climb out of the trench first and shout 'follow me' and to move around the battlefield looking after his men. So they did, and they died in huge numbers.
The BBC says 12% of the British army's non-commissioned soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers.
The actual Prime Minister during the way, Asquith lost a son. Andrew Bonar Law (PM in the 1920s) lost two. Anthony Eden (PM in the 50s) lost two brothers and another brother was badly wounded.
No - it's pointing out what advertising is trying to do, which is not necessarily about privacy at all.
Meanwhile, it's apparently also worth pointing out that advertiser do not show anyone ads. Newspapers do. The media you enjoy and value shows you ads, and is paid for by them.