TOfter three years and more than 100 issues, plus two paternity leaves, two AI summits and a whole boom and bust cycle for cryptocurrencies, this is my last newsletter. It’s also the end of my 11 years at the Guardian, almost to the same week: my first day was the launch of the iPhone 5S, and on 9 September we’ll see the launch of the iPhone 16. It’s been a journey.
Over the past two weeks I’ve been asking readers for questions and I’ve received many. I apologize if I haven’t been able to answer yours, but many thanks to everyone who wrote in.
What has been the most surprising thing you’ve discovered while researching or reporting for 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, written and enforced globally, to enforce Chinese foreign policy on its platform. The leak showed that the company censored videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
TikTok insisted that the documents were outdated, even at the time, and had been pulled a few months earlier and replaced with new, locally sensitive guidelines. As a sign of the direction the company was moving, that was a good sign. But that leak provides the basis, to this day, for concerns that the company is not as separate from the Chinese state as it suggests.
Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil He says that within 20 years we will have the ability to duplicate a person’s mind in a computer.including all your memories, His personality and awareness. Do you think this claim is credible? – David
Kurzweil’s “singularity” has been 20 years in the future for the past 30 years, so I’m not sure there’s any reason to put much weight on the date he predicts. But the biggest problem for me with his predictions is that, in recent years, the order of operations has changed a bit.
The old singularist view was that computers would get faster and faster, and eventually they would be fast enough to mimic a brain, at which point uploads would become possible. This is subtly different from the utopian worldview of AI, which is that AI becomes more and more capable until it AI Solves the problem of uploading a human brain.
In that vision of the future, data transfer to mobile devices only becomes a reality after super-intelligent AI has been created that is transforming the world. It seems like an odd topic to focus on!
Do you think Facebook and Google have already peaked?And face a slow but inevitable decline into relative insignificance? – Barney
Never say never. Companies reinvent themselves all the time. The best example of this is, of course, the technology sector: Apple, which in the 1990s was all but dismissed as a major player before launching its remarkable resurgence, from the iMac to the iPhone. Both Meta and Google are racing to try and take a leading position in the field of artificial intelligence, which could make them, once again, some of the most important companies on the planet.
But I agree with the premise of the question: there is a shift in enthusiasm and attention in technology, and the existing businesses of Google and Meta are on the downside of that shift. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Google Search will continue to print money for the foreseeable future, but none of them are on the exciting frontier of the industry anymore.
Of course, when a company is the fourth or sixth largest in the world, it’s hard not to have hit a ceiling. There’s not much more “up” to go.
Where are smartphones headed from here? How can a new smartphone model really stand out from the rest? – John Brown
The boring but true answer is that foldable phones are going to steadily fall in price and rise in quality until there’s a sudden blossoming of creativity in hardware design. Samsung has led the way with its two offerings: the clamshell-style Flip, which was seen a lot at the Olympics, and the folio-style Fold. The display technology isn’t perfect yet, with a noticeable ridge down the middle of the unfolded phone, and prices range from high to exorbitant, but the devices are the only truly novel designs the industry has seen in the past decade.
And then in a year or two, Apple will release a foldable device and everyone will realize they exist.
The vibe around technology seems to have changed a lot in the last half decade or so: there seems to be a lot more anxiety about how Society will change for the worse and there is not much optimism.Do you think the industry can overcome that? – Ido Vock
I think technology today is a lot like finance was 15 years ago. It will continue to attract smart, capable people because the work is interesting and well-paid, but there is a very clear change in the environment. I don’t think the industry can turn back, but I wonder to what extent it is necessary. Money solves many ills and it is better to be rich than optimistic.
The real question, for me, is whether that shift in the tech sector threatens to spill over into a broader cynicism around the idea that science and technology can improve the world. I hope not. I remain, at my core, optimistic about human progress, and I think some of the upcoming advances in fields like healthcare, green energy and even spaceflight will be exciting.
After the newsletter promotion
The Best Game of All Time (and Why It’s a… Transmitted souls)? – Chris M
The Soulsborne games, for those unaware, are a genre created by developer From Software and its auteur director Hidetaka Miyazaki that is characterized by punishing difficulty curves, oblique narrative structures, and a tone that can be memorably summed up as “a little screwed-up guy laughing at you from behind a closed door.” Personally, I have a soft spot for Bloodborne, the 2015 entry in the series for the PlayStation 4, but I’m 50 hours into Elden Ring, the most recent Soulsborne, and it’s damn good.
The best game of all time, though, remains The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Six years on from the Switch’s release and its console-defining launch title, it still hasn’t been topped, not even by its flawless sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. That said, Elden Ring is a great game for adults who are too proud to be seen with an all-ages title, but it’s actually a bit of gothic Zelda.
If I keep talking about this, I’ll have to co-brand my final newsletter with Pushing Buttons, so let’s end here.
What is the best example you have seen of technology that has provided truly valuable positive change to the world during your work? – Steve Parks
In my professional life, the answer is, without a doubt, automatic transcription. It’s not flashy, but being able to generate a real-time, flawed transcript of an interview recording is a real game-changer for journalism, speeding up the work of turning an idea into a published story by hours.
More broadly, I think a similar answer is the rise of machine translation. These tools have slowly and steadily improved over the past 20 years to the point where significant swathes of humanity can now communicate with each other, basically intelligibly, in near real time. One of the most interesting results of this is that, at least in the short term, nothing has really changed. Language proficiency is still valuable, people still largely consume content in their own language or professionally translated, and there hasn’t been a huge coalescence of online communities into one huge global mashup.
Maybe that will happen? Or maybe this technology turned into science fiction will still be useful to make my vacation more bearable and allow me to read funny posts from Bluesky from Japan.
What’s next? – 17 different readers, thanks to all.
After 11 years at the Guardian, I’m not going to move straight on to something else and will be taking the next six weeks off. Until then, you can keep in touch with me on some of the weirder social media sites, such as Blue sky either BackwardnessI won’t be writing a weekly newsletter again in the near future, but if you’re interested in an infrequent update on where I’ve posted stories, I intend to put up an occasional roundup at My Substack inactive.
I’ve met a lot of TechScape readers over the years and have always been very happy. Thanks to everyone who read, emailed or shared a story and stuck around – there are some great writers out there ready to take up the mantle.