Move fast and break everything?

They’re banning phones in classrooms. Red states and blue, it’s a bipartisan push. Eighteen years after the debut of the iPhone, education is scrambling to manage the fall out in learning from the smartphone revolution - just in time for the arrival of AI. Education is far from alone in its scramble.

 When the pandemic hit, the tech vendors (looking at you, Zoom), consultants and academics assured us that the future of office work was definitely remote. Policies changed, employees de-camped for more scenic vistas. Office leasing costs went down, employees from everywhere could be hired to work anywhere! A few years later, however, companies are grappling with some evident shortcomings of the remote-work reality (collaboration? camaraderie?) and how best to alter it. A hybrid return to office seems to be the predominant initial gambit.

 Silicon Valley has always lauded The Disruptor. The model for tech start-up success has long been a fast, hard charge that scatters the pieces. Get noticed and go big. The rise of AI is following that same playbook. Where once the rush was to the Web, now it is to AI. As with the Web, there is truth to the hype

I spent 11 years during the dot-com boom as an executive with tech trade magazine publisher Ziff Davis. I launched KingFish + Partners after that boom went bust. I understand the power of technology and the hype that drives its adoption. This experience and understanding informed my decision to launch Wetware Studios as an AI-focused operation, rather than look for spots to plug AI tools into KingFish. 

Navigating the frothy terrain of a rapidly evolving vendor landscape. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of various LLMs. Learning how to engineer effective prompts and institute efficient processes to put expert humans in the loop in order to ensure output is accurate, on-brand and human. Getting AI right takes thought and real focus. That’s what we do in Wetware Studios, and it’s working.

 And KingFish? Oh, it’s definitely staying in the mix. That’s essential. AI feeds on human creativity, originality and insight. Trying to replace that human capability with code is a recipe for a raft of unintended consequences (more on that in another post).

 Artificial Intelligence is powerful stuff - just not the click-click-done magic the current hype would have you believe.