Tech

  • Linked – You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    That seems to be what happens in the tech journalism space. We have a list of people who’ve created successful companies and made a ton of money doing it, and everyone is supposed to assume that they are so bright they can do it over and over again. Then we are surprised when Elon buys Twitter and runs it into the ground or when Meta can’t find a market for the Metaverse. Microsoft spends billions upon billions of dollars on AI without any hope of making a profit for years while conducting rounds of layoffs to offset those costs. We assume they know what they’re doing because they’ve succeeded in other markets before, and the press doesn’t challenge them when they say provably false things. 

    It’s the Halo Effect. We assume that successful people are smart and kind and live healthy lives, especially if they are white men. When they contradict this picture we’ve painted, we loathe to admit it, let alone call it out in an interview. It’s more cognitively comfortable for us to continue believing they are competent and will figure it out.

  • My new browser of choice – ARC

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Simply put, I can’t log in and out of accounts all day, and I also don’t want to deal with my computer running out of memory. I spent many years walking that thin line. So, I was intrigued when I saw someone talking about a new browser they were using that was easy to use with multiple profiles and optimized for memory usage. I was skeptical but intrigued enough to give it a try. 

    That browser was Arc for Mac. 

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    Linked – AI Agents Come For White Collar Jobs

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    How often have we watched a C-level person from Microsoft remind us that AI will not take our jobs but help us do our jobs better? It was there to assist us, not work for us.

    “It’s even in the name, Copilot.”

    When I heard them talk about agents being our team members and eventually managing other agents and their tasks, I immediately thought this was no longer a copilot. If it’s a team member, that means fewer human team members to do the work.

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    Linked – Looks like genAI may kill the IT help desk and other IT jobs!

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    On a deeper level, though, I remember that before I got into eDiscovery and legal tech, I worked in tech support. Many of the smartest people in legal and cybersecurity started at a helpdesk. It’s the starting point for many long and successful IT careers. So, what will the next generation of tech workers be missing if that role goes away?

  • Linked – Is AI the new bloatware?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Whether you consider it bloatware or not may depend on your plan to use AI on a mobile device, but one thing is for sure about all hardware and many services that are adding AI features: They’re getting more expensive. 

    Adding the power to run AI tools locally costs money. If all Pixel phones are going to do all the AI work on photos and all the iPhones are going to process ChatGPT interactions locally, that’s going to require more expensive hardware. 

    If all Windows PCs will come with Recall, the same thing applies. The chips that can handle these transactions are in high demand and are not cheap. 

  • Linked – At ILTACON, Anticipation for the Shiny Object

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    It’s easy to walk away from a conference like this one with the impression that it’s just a matter of time. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that the AI technology we see in front of us is just OK. It’s not world-changing, and it’s sometimes downright awful. As I’ve said before, will the huge investments ever pay off? We are all waiting to see. How long will we continue to talk about the future of AI instead of how it’s changed our world?