Fear, Trust, and Success

Monte Python had a famous scene where three cardinals burst in proclaiming, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." While we may laugh at it now, the fear created by the Inquisition caused economic issues. In Italy, the fear of the inquisition caused a number of scientists to leave the country and bringing economic growth from Italy to where they settled. Some claim that they can measure in places reduced business activity and less investment in people hundreds of years later because of that fear. A climate of fear is bad for business. Fear causes reduced innovation and taking of risks.

Throughout written history, there has been different ways of making wealth. Some found great wealth through trade, sharing new ideas, and inventions. Others found themselves with wealth and tried to preserve that by forcing others to obey. The ancient Spartans declared war against their own workers on a regular basis to keep them controlled.

Business is built on new ideas and business is about people, not technology. Peter Drucker stated that business has only two main functions: innovation and marketing. Trust is fundamental to both.

Trade has long been built upon trust. The first known system to support merchants trading over distance is the ancient money transfer system called Hawala. It is built upon two people trusting each other. Someone hands money to the Hawala person in one country. He communicates that to his trusted person in another country who can then hand an equivalent amount to the final recipient. Bills of exchange and international lines of credit are more recent. All these allow trade to happen without needing to carry large amounts of coins where a merchant could be robbed.

Leadership is based on trust. Good leaders build safety for people to experiment, try new ideas, and fail without being destroyed. Good leaders build a team that can surpass them, be smarter than they are, and work in ways that the leader didn't expect or control. Good leaders set the stage by being vulnerable, sharing mistakes, accepting mistakes by others so that people can learn, grow and be better in the future. Innovation happens in places where people feel safe.

The Silicon Valley mantra of "move fast and break things" violates that trust. It is one thing for a small company to break a few things to find out what really works. It is far more significant when a major corporation tries to go outside of socially acceptable behavior. Businesses need to be held accountable for their actions. We need to be able to trust that members of business community will work for the good of all (while trying to make a good profit).

There are those who try to do public actions to indicate trustworthiness while breaking the rules. These get found out fairly quickly and it doesn't work.

Trust is the basis for long term success. Let us build a trustworthy society.

Ads Polluting AI

AI can't continue to be free for everyone. When the investment to make AI is running far more than $50 Billion per year, someone will eventually have to pay for that. AI will either become a subscription service or be paid for by ads. Most people assume that AI will remain neutral but it can't continue this way. AI companies might not be trustworthy partners. Do we really want to give advertisers access to our customers or have other company's ads showing up inside our products? The current push to put AI into everything can become a financial or reputational risk.

The economics of AI are starting to come home. Right now, almost nobody is paying for AI but the costs are rising. AI companies are going to face a tremendous pressure to make money. There are three ways to do that: user subscriptions, advertising, or governments sponsorship. Currently, user subscriptions are paying only 5% of the costs of AI.

OpenAI was started with the goal of making AI available to all, but the costs are getting so large that they are now looking to add advertising to the results.

The most likely future is where AI becomes an advertising platform instead of just providing answers. At some point, AI will be recommending advertiser's products. The hard question is: will the ads be explicit or will the ads modify the AI results? Already many AI products collect your data which could be shared with advertisers.

The next stage is for companies to pay for AI to recommend their products instead of providing neutral results.

Soon, it will be time to view AI results as simply advertising instead of solid recommendations.

When AI is built into word processing, spreadsheets, and other applications, that would give advertisers far more access into business and personal life. This is the time to rethink the push to add AI to every computer application out there. Do we really want to give advertisers access to our customers?

Risky World

In the AI resume writing vs AI resume evaluating war and now with AI doing the interviews, it turns out that which AI you use can make a difference. Each AI machine tends to prefer resumes written by it. Soon, figuring out which AI is being used at each company will make a difference in sending in resumes.