Evenly Distributed

Here’s a funny thing. As I type Americans are going to the polls to vote for a new President. Also as I type Nvidia is up 2.04% and is extending its lead as the largest publicly traded company in the world.

Over the last few months how many times have you heard Kamala Harris or Donald Trump talk about Nvidia? Or artificial intelligence? Or the fourth industrial revolution? Or digital re-skilling? Or digitization? Or jobs of the future? Or digital literacy? Let alone scaling? Or effective accelerationisim?

Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall a single soundbite about the momentous time we live in; ? plenty about the sturm und drang and trivia both parties wallow in, but hardly a word about issues that will dictate the future direction of the US and the world - issues that will fill the history books of the future long after all the nonsense of current day to day politics are forgotten and compressed to a barely read footnote.

Of course we can blame politicians and their circus followers for this jarring omission but I think another tribe of people share much of the blame - those in the commanding heights of the tech industry.

Few tech leaders are doing an adequate job in explaining what’s at stake and what to do when machines do more and more, if not everything. On the one hand there are the hyperventilating arm wavers - “AI this, AI that”, “we’re building utopia”, “we’re summoning dystopia”. On the other, there are the dull as ditch water “pragmatists”, wrapping themselves in the dismal science and putting out position papers whose only goal is to signal that they “get it” but does so in a way designed to not scare any horses.

Both political sides have had their digital surrogates - Musk for the elephants and Cuban for the donkeys, but both have been hampered by their increasingly cartoonish personas. Where are the serious people ? The people who can lay out cooly and calmly what America needs to do to lead in the next 100 years? The people who can build the future many of us dream of and all of us count on?

MIA.

Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have had a run at doing it recently. Both fell at the first hurdle, in my, of course, extremely humble opinion.

I’ve recently returned home after riding my motorcycle to the west coast and back. As I rode from sea to shinning sea I witnessed a curious phenomena - that though America is the most technologically advanced country in the world, it is, when you get out and about, very undigital. Beyond the point of sale checkout, the cellphone in everyone’s hand, and the occasional QR code, “digitization” is likewise missing in action. After years, nay decades, of the tech industry talking about the glorious tech future, technology is still peripheral for the vast majority of ordinary people. Where is the tech that has made applying for healthcare easier? That has improved children’s grades? That has reduced waste/spillage/corruption in the public sector tendering process? That has driven prices down? Where is the tech that through a simple photo of a flat rear tire locates you, verifies you, summons a tow truck, alerts the garage to what’s needed, bills you, and gets you on your way, no tedious paperwork and phone calls required. (One flat in 9,000 miles! Great job BMW!)

MIA.

As we sit and wait for the still analog process of voting to reveal who our next analog loving President will be it’s worth pondering on the fact that while Amara’s Law is probably on balance correct, the past is still evenly distributed and the digital future America’s prospects rest on is still the work ahead of us. Even though Nvidia is now up 2.65%.