For my final email, I open the TechScape mailbag for throwbacks, highlights and predictions on the issues that are preoccupying you now
After three years and more than 100 issues, as well as two bouts of paternity leave, two AI summits and an entire cryptocurrency boom-bust cycle, this is my last newsletter. It’s also the end of my 11 years at the Guardian, almost to the week: my first day was the release of the iPhone 5S, and on 9 September we’ll see the launch of the iPhone 16. It’s been a ride.
For the last two weeks I’ve been asking readers for questions and have been bombarded. I apologise if I didn’t get round to yours, but thank you so much to everyone who wrote in.
What’s been the most shocking thing you’ve discovered in researching/reporting on the TechScape? – Alexandria Weber
In 2019, I was sent a leak of TikTok’s internal moderation documents. They revealed, for the first time, that the company had explicit policies, in writing and applied globally, to enforce Chinese foreign policy on its platform. The company, the leak showed, censored videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
TikTok insisted the documents were out-of-date, even at the time, and that they had been retired some months earlier and replaced with new, locally sensitive guidelines. As a mark of the direction the company was moving in, that was a good sign. But that leak provides the basis, to this day, of concerns that the company isn’t as separate from the Chinese state as it suggests.
Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil says that within 20 years we will have the ability to duplicate a person’s mind in a computer, including all their memories, their personality and consciousness. Do you think this claim is credible? – David
Kurzweil’s “singularity” has been 20 years in the future for the last 30, so I’m not sure there’s reason to put much weight on the date he predicts. But the bigger problem for me with his predictions is that, in the last few years, the order of operations has changed somewhat.
The old singularitarian view was that computers were getting faster and faster, and eventually they would get fast enough to mimic a brain, at which point uploads would be possible. That’s subtly different from the AI utopian worldview, which is that AI gets more and more capable until the AI cracks the problem of uploading a human brain.
In that vision of the future, uploading your brain only even becomes a thing after superintelligent AI is already created and reshaping the world. It seems like an odd thing to focus on!
Do you think Facebook and Google have already peaked, and face a slow but inevitable slide into relative insignificance? – Barney
Never say never. Companies reinvent themselves all the time – tech, of course, has the greatest example of that with Apple, all but written-off as a leading player in the 1990s before launching its remarkable revival, from the iMac to the iPhone.
