11 Comments

Brilliant as usual, Ted. May I draw your attention to an alternative search engine called Yep which does three things:

1. Stores your search history on your own phone to protect privacy,

2. Uses AI to provide an answer to your question but does so transparently citing sources and with a disclaimer that its synthesis can only ever be as good as those sources,

3. Promises to funnel 90% of its ad revenue back to content creators.

It's serviceable enough. It has some appealing randomness that reminds me of late 1990s Yahoo. One can install the app from the Playstore and I suggest that everyone who cares about repairing our broken tech and societal model gives it a go.

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That was great Ted! I started working for the Ma Bell in 1984, just after divestiture. I was a service splice technician, and then an outside plant engineer. The pace and transformation of the technology in my short time there was a astounding. A constant deployment of newer better technology.

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brilliant piece. now to think another fifty years ahead, when we'll be lucky to breathe without paying for the air...

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The disconnect you describe is the exact subject of FTC chair Lina Khan’s famous paper “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

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Thank you for this piece. I was part of AT&T in the early 90's after they had split. They had just bought NCR (another disaster) but if they had given away NCR personal computers for free bundled with their internet software (AT&T WorldNet) they could have been dominant in the dial up internet business and given AOL a real run. But of course dial up died too.

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Sep 24, 2021Liked by Ted Gioia

that's a brilliant piece! i wonder if you'd mind if I translate it to French (and adapt it to the local Telegraph conoany, not AT&T - and of course link - explain that it's a translation of your article)

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Kind of the way religious people say "God created man in his own image and likeness." I think that men created the Wonderful World Wide Web and the magic of AI in their own image. This could be the next stage of evolution if the entire biological support system was not about to collapse, and the infrastructure needed for maintaining the current level of technology didn't require billions of prosperous souls to keep it going.

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