Today’s headlines are dominated by AI, and rightfully so. Are machines the new gods or the greatest bubble in history? Either way, this wave of AI will define a course for humanity.
But for all the talk about AI, we’ve spent far too little time talking about the business model that led us here: advertising. This is the story told in my new book, Human Dot AI.
If “advertising” sounds too boring, think of it instead as the business of shaping human opinion at global scale—the attention economy. Advertising is the business model that underlies many of the largest tech companies in the world and shapes the information diet of billions of people.
But all of this only matters in the context of what comes next in a world with generative AI. How will news and entertainment change? What skills will we all need when we can talk to machines, and they can talk back to us?
Advertising has an important role to play in the generational technology shift that is upon us, and those of us in the business have a responsibility to make sure advertising doesn’t misalign AI with human interests.
Human Dot AI tells three stories:
- How our current media diet, and the world we know, was shaped by machines (early AI) seeking advertising.
- How being good at being human, and connecting with other humans, has always mattered most and will only matter more in the age of AI.
- What comes next in a world of generative AI and how the business model of advertising (the fight for our attention) will shape human lives as well as the future of the most important technology ever created.
I’m sharing an excerpt from the introduction of Human Dot AI below to illustrate how different—and in some ways, very familiar—the attention economy looked when I was just starting out in the advertising business.
Human Dot AI will be published Nov. 10 by Amplify Publishing Group. Preorder your copy here.
The Business of Attention
2019, Tokyo, 5 a.m. I was pacing around the pool of the Park Hyatt, the hotel immortalized in Lost in Translation, the film in which Bill Murray plays a world-weary actor summoned to Japan to film a Suntory whiskey commercial. With the neon lights of the city blinking forty-seven floors beneath me, incredibly loopy from the jet lag, I was suspended in time. And for the second time in my life, I was fired by a mouse.
I’d been expecting the call from Disney HR. It had been on the calendar for months. I’d always loved climbing—trees, mountains, buildings (if my Tokyo setting was any indication), and jobs. And now I was going to fall, or at least take the express elevator down.
