The Future Is Here and It’s Watching You
Jack Dorsey lays off 4,000 people for gains not yet realized, your Ray-Bans have outsourced your privacy to Nairobi, and Burger King just gamified your friendliness
Dear Friend,
What a week (again) it has been! AI continues to be everywhere, geopolitics are running hot, and somehow, in the midst of it all, we are still preparing our US tax returns. If that all feels a bit bonkers, you are not alone. Meanwhile, Block (Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s company) has just announced that it is going to lay off 40% of its workforce (4,000 people) – not because of any actual productivity gains through their use of AI, but in anticipation of them. Yep, as said: it’s all a bit bonkers.
Maybe now is a good time to take a break, grab a coffee, and catch up on the latest news?!
P.S. On the Built for Turbulence podcast, I got to interview Andreas Bachmann, co-founder and CEO of Adacor, a German software development company. We talked, among other things, about the impact of AI on his business and their people – and Andreas took a decidedly different position to Dorsey. Have a listen.
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
Do You Want Fries With That? Talk about a dystopian future. Burger King is testing a new headset for its drive-thru staff, which “compiles ‘friendliness scores’ at the fast-food chain’s locations based on employees’ conversations, according to a promotional video the company shared with the BBC.” There is so much to unpack here – the sheer fact that the company cheerfully shared a “promotional video” about its AI-driven surveillance tech is probably all that you need to know.
In all fairness, the company says the technology “[…] is not designed to ‘record conversations or evaluate individual employees’” – yet. Black Mirror, anyone?
Customer service calls have routinely been recorded and monitored for years. Employees are often aware that they can be assessed to ensure they’re using the correct language. But this latest step by Burger King elicited swift condemnation among some social media users who described it as “dystopian”. Others questioned how accurate the chat-bot headsets will be, given that AI tools have proven to be prone to errors.
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Now Everybody Knows You’re a Dog. A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 depicted two dogs in front of a computer, with one of them saying, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The joke reflected the fact that, at the time, on the Internet, we reveled in pseudonymity – the act of being able to shield your true identity behind a screen name. Thanks to our friend, the omnipresent LLM, that’s all about to change.
The finding, from a recently published research paper, is based on results of experiments correlating specific individuals with accounts or posts across more than one social media platform. The success rate was far greater than existing classical deanonymization work that relied on humans assembling structured data sets suitable for algorithmic matching or manual work by skilled investigators.
This is genuinely bad news for the many groups of people who have a legitimate reason to hide their identity.
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You Bought Zuck’s Ray-Bans. Now Someone in Nairobi Is Watching You Poop. In the same line of thought as the above – and the headline says it all already – Meta’s Smart Glasses are a complete privacy disaster. Which, of course, is not particularly surprising given it’s… well… Meta. Not sure how many wearers of Meta’s nifty Ray-Bans and Oakleys are aware of the fact that they opted into their camera feed being used to train Meta’s AI – with disastrous results:
Workers at Sama, one of Meta’s annotation subcontractors, describe reviewing video of people undressing, coming out of bathrooms naked, watching porn, having sex, and exposing bank card details.
Yep. It’s bad.
What We Are Reading
Diagnostics Startup Droplet Biosciences Partners With Nvidia to Speed Cancer Testing Droplet’s method can detect residual disease in 24 hours by analyzing lymphatic fluid collected post-surgery, compared to the four to six weeks it typically takes for tumor remnants to appear in blood-based tests. @Mafe
I Worked for Block; Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem Whatever the AI-enabled performance of post-realignment Block turns out to be, the market’s reaction to the mass layoff there last week basically ensures that the narrative strategy will be copied – maybe widely. @Jeffrey
SaaS In, SaaS Out: Here’s What’s Driving the SaaSpocalypse The so-called “SaaSpocalypse” feels less like collapse and more like correction. I’m seeing more small & mid-size orgs quietly choose to build their own tools because AI has made it absurdly easy and cheap to do so. @Kacee
Tech Legend Stewart Brand on Musk, Bezos and His Extraordinary Life: ‘We Don’t Need to Passively Accept Our Fate’ There are few people like Stewart Brand. Now in his late 80s, he is still actively shaping the future – through an exploration into “maintenance.” @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🙀 One of the best ways to keep your AI news balanced, is to read opposing viewpoints. Here is Ed Zitron’s inline comments on the CitriniResearch article which shook the stock markets. Well worth a read – and hilarious.
🥸 AI Agents are all the rage – for good reason; what felt like a toy just a few months ago, is now a powerful tool (just try out Claude Cowork). Your new job is to onboard AI agents: how AI native companies actually operate.
👨🏼💻 Fascinating insights into the future of software engineering in the form of a retreat summary by the fine folks at Thoughtworks.
☕ If you know me, you know that I love (exceptional) coffee. Honore de Balzac’s treatise on “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee” is pure gold.
🍳 Between milk, flour, and eggs lies a whole bermuda triangle of unexplored breakfast territory. Here goes the “The Hunt for Dark Breakfast.”
🩺 Please, do not trust AI with your health. Another point in case: ‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies
📈 Up, up, it goes. Always interesting to see what the current state of affairs is in the world of consumer AI.
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Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.