transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks, instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's ACID compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB ,.com/build. Support for Decoder comes from Adobe. Life is unpredictable. And that means you need your projects to adapt with whatever gets thrown at you. That means mastering the ability to pivot and collaborate with others to reach your goals. Adobe gets that, which is why they made a tool that's just as flexible as you are. PDF spaces and Acrobat. Your PDF files are no longer static. Instead, they're living documents that flex with you and your project's needs. Learn more at adobe.com/do that with Acrobat. Support for the show comes from Hostinger. Ever had an idea for a business or side hustle, but never actually launched it? With Hostinger, you can turn that idea into something real in minutes instead of weeks. Hostinger is an all-in-one platform that brings everything into one place. Your domain, website, email marketing, AI tools, and AI agents. You can create websites, online stores, and custom apps with simple prompts. Then use AI agents to automate tedious tasks and grow your business. Go to hostinger.com/decoder to bring your idea online for under $3 a month. Use promo code Decoder for an extra 20 percent off.

Speaker 2:
[01:53] Today, I want to lay out an idea that's been banging around my head for weeks now as we've been reporting on AI and having conversations here on Decoder. I've been calling it Software Brain, and it's a particular way of seeing the world that fits everything into algorithms and databases and loops. Software. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Software Brain is powerful stuff. It is a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, who is the literal embodiment of Software Brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal called Software is Eating the World. Lately, software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how much regular people are growing to dislike it. In fact, the polling on this is so strong. I think it's fair to say that a lot of people hate AI and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more the more they encounter it. There's that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorables than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and Democrats generally. That's with nearly two-thirds of respondents saying they'd used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good. While more than 80% of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about technology, only 35% of people were excited about it. And poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18% of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already bad 27% last year. At the same time, anger is growing. 31% of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22% last year. Now, I obviously talked to a lot of tech executives and policy people here on Decoder, and I will tell you, they all know AI isn't popular, and they can all see how that's playing out in real life. Here's Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, talking about how the tech industry needs to make the case for the enormous investments it's making in AI.

Speaker 3:
[03:57] Well, at the end of the day, I think that this industry to which I belong needs to earn the social permission to consume energy, because we're doing good in the world.

Speaker 2:
[04:09] I think it's safe to say the tech industry and AI have not earned any of that social permission yet. Politicians from both sides of the aisle are opposing data center build outs. Politicians in local communities that support data centers are getting voted out of office. And in the most depressing reminder of how much political violence has become part of everyday American life, politicians who've supported data centers have gotten their houses shot at. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has had Molotov cocktails thrown at his house. It's sad that I'm about to say this again on the show, and it's sad that we're gonna have commenters who disagree, but this violence is unacceptable. If you want to meaningfully oppose AI in a way that lasts, you should speak loudly with your dollars in the marketplace and your attention on the internet, and you should speak even more loudly with your votes in the democratic regulatory and political process. Anything else will get dismissed and be used to perpetuate the cycle. That dismissal is already happening. I also think it's incredibly important for politicians and tech executives to make sure that political process I'm describing makes people feel empowered, not helpless, which is causing a specific kind of nihilism that we have all greatly contributed to. The violence is a result of that helplessness and nihilism. And the most powerful people in our society ought to reckon with that. Especially as they run around saying AI will wipe out all the jobs. That's not even remotely an exaggeration. Here's Anthropic CEO Dario Amode saying he thinks AI will wipe out all the jobs.

Speaker 4:
[05:32] Entry level jobs in areas like finance, consulting, tech, many, many other areas like that. Entry level white collar work. I worry that those things are going to be first augmented but before long replaced by AI systems. It's hard to predict the future, but we may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands as the pipeline for these early stage white collar work starts to contract and dry out.

Speaker 2:
[06:02] What I see when I encounter clips like that is the true gap between the tech industry and regular people when it comes to AI. The limit of software brain. Like I said, everyone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they're missing is why. They think this is a marketing problem. OpenAI just spent $200 million in the TBPN podcast because they think it will help make people like AI more. Sam Altman said it explicitly.

Speaker 5:
[06:28] They are genius marketers and I would love to have better marketing. Someone said to me recently that if AI were a political candidate, it will be the least popular political candidate in history. Given the amazing things AI can do, I think there's got to be better marketing for AI.

Speaker 2:
[06:42] It feels like someone needs to say this clearly, so I'm just going to say it. AI does not have a marketing problem. People experience these tools every single day. ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users trending to a billion. Everyone has seen AI overviews in Google search and massive amounts of slop on their feeds. You can't advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

Speaker 1:
[07:26] Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com/build. Support for Decoder comes from Adobe. For every big idea, your documents folder tells a story. Let's say you've just finished pulling together a brief. So you hit export on finalversion.pdf. But then you open the file and you immediately notice a typo. Several versions later, you're exporting finalv4.actualfinaldraft.pdf. Adobe Acrobat can save you the digital clutter with PDF spaces. It takes your documents and turns them into a living project that you can engage with, get insights from, and collaborate with others on. You can gather all your files into one workspace and have a whole conversation with your AI assistant about it, and ask questions to get deep insights about your project. You can even invite people to your PDF space and let them add files, comments, notes, and more. You could doodle in the margins or even turn your project into your own personal podcast episode. Acrobat lets you generate an audio overview of your project in just one click. Learn more at adobe.com/do that with Acrobat. Support for today's show comes from CNN. Do you want to live forever? Influential journalist Kara Swisher is taking a hard look at the longevity industry to separate the influencer hype from evidence-backed science. In her new CNN original series, Kara is talking to Silicon Valley power players and trying out the latest in anti-aging technology to see what works and what's a waste. Kara Swisher wants to live forever. New episode streaming Sundays with a CNN subscription. Go to cnn.com/subscribe to start watching. Support for this show comes from Serval AI. A functioning IT team shouldn't be wasting almost half their day on repetitive tickets. Things like password resets, access requests, and onboarding. Those T's tasks are pulling your team away from the actual meaningful work. But with Serval, you can cut 80 percent of your help desk tickets. Unlike other legacy players, Serval was built for AI agents from the ground up. Serval AI writes automation in seconds. Your IT team just describes what they need in plain English, and Serval generates production ready automations instantly. Plus Serval guarantees 50 percent help desk automation by week four of your free pilot. But try it now because pilots are limited. Serval powers the fastest growing companies in the world, like Perplexity, Merkur, Verkata and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot at serval.com/decoder. That's serval.com/decoder. Support for Decoder comes from Adobe. For every big idea, your Documents folder tells a story. Let's say you've just finished pulling together a brief. So you hit Export on finalversion.pdf, but then you open the file, and you immediately notice a typo. Several versions later, you're exporting finalv4.actualfinaldraft.pdf. Adobe Acrobat can save you the digital clutter with PDF spaces. It takes your documents and turns them into a living project that you can engage with, get insights from, and collaborate with others on. You can gather all your files into one workspace and have a whole conversation with your AI assistant about it, and ask questions to get deep insights about your project. You can even invite people to your PDF space and let them add files, comments, notes, and more. You could doodle in the margins or even turn your project into your own personal podcast episode. Acrobat lets you generate an audio overview of your project in just one click. Learn more at adobe.com/do that with Acrobat.

Speaker 2:
[12:29] So what does software bring? The simplest definition I've come up with is that it's when you see the entire world as a series of databases that can be controlled with structured language, software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives runs through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them. Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge's website is a database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it's a small jump to feeling like you can control the world if you can just control those databases. There are some big examples of this. Elon Musk and Doge showed up in the government, and the first thing they did was take control of a bunch of databases. Then they ran into the fact that the databases didn't really reflect reality, and Doge ended in hilarious failure. This is the limit of software brain. The government isn't just a bunch of databases. It isn't just software. People aren't computers, and they don't live in automatable loops that can be neatly captured in those databases. Anyone who's ever actually run a database knows this. At some point, the database stops matching reality. And at that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. The AI industry has fully lost sight of this. AI thrives on data. It's just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around. It's the same with the other part of software brain, the use of structured language. Let me use another example that I think about all the time, especially as AI finds a real fit as a business tool. It's the idea that AI is coming for lawyers and the legal system. The AI industry loves to talk about not needing lawyers anymore, which is already getting all kinds of people into all kinds of trouble. But I get it. I've spent a lot of time with lawyers. I used to be a lawyer. My wife is still a lawyer. Some of my best friends are lawyers. I also spend all of my time at work talking to tech people. And so over time, I've learned that the overlap between software brain and lawyer brain is very deep, alluringly deep. If an important part of software brain is the idea that thinking in the structured language of code can make things happen in the real world, well, the heart of lawyer brain is that thinking in the structured legal language of statutes and citations can also make things happen. Well, it can give you power over society. I can keep going. Both software development and the law depend heavily on precedent. We have a body of case law in this country, and we use it over and over again to help us resolve disputes, much like engineers have libraries of code that they turn to repeatedly to build the foundations of their products. At the end of the day, I'm making a simple comparison here. Both lawyers and engineers do their best to use formal, structured language to guide the behavior of complicated systems in predictable and potentially profitable ways. I'm far from the first person with this idea. Larry Lessig wrote a book called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 2000. That book is just as relevant today as it was a quarter century ago. And so you have this intoxicating similarity between law and code, and it trips people up all the time in all kinds of ways. People are constantly trying to issue commands to society at large, like it's a computer that will obey instructions. My favorite example of this are those Facebook forwards insisting that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have the right to copy people's photos. Every time I see one of those, I think to myself, it would be great if the law was actually code. Maybe things would be more predictable. Maybe we'd all feel more in control. But the law isn't actually code. And society and courts aren't computers. I have to remind our fairly technical audience under Decoder and At the Verge that the law is not deterministic all the time. You cannot simply take the facts of a case, apply the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty. Even though the formality of the legal system makes people think they can. The formality makes people think the law works like a computer, that it's predictable. But in truth, our legal system actually requires ambiguity. Ambiguity is what makes lawyers lawyers. It's what makes people hate lawyers. It's always possible to argue the other side of a case. And it's always possible to find the gray area in the law. That's why prosecutors end up as defense attorneys. And it's why our regulators end up working for big corporations. So you can see the obvious collision between software brain and lawyer brain. This thing that looks like a computer isn't anything at all like a computer. You can argue that this is a mistake. That the law should be more like a computer. That the system should be verifiable and consistent. And that merely issuing the right commands at the right time should lead to an objectively correct outcome. Bridget McCormack, who used to be the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, came on Decoder just a few months ago, pitching a fully automated AI arbitration system. Her argument to me was that people perceive the traditional legal system to be unfair. And they will accept a worse outcome from an automated system as more fair if they feel heard. And if there's one thing AI can do, it's sit there and listen all day and all night. I don't know if any of that is correct, or even workable. But I do know software brain, and that's pure software brain. The idea that we can force the real world to act like a computer, and then have AI issue that computer instructions. Zoom out and you can see the same thing happening in every other kind of industry. You don't hire a big consulting firm to actually come in and study your business and make it more efficient. You hire them to generate slide decks that justify layoffs to your board and shareholders. Big consulting firms are great at this, and now they're going to automate that task. They're going to generate those decks with AI. They're already doing the layoffs. Any repetitive business process that looks like code talking to a database is up for grabs. That's why Anthropic has been so relentlessly focused on enterprise customers, and it's why OpenAI is pivoting to business use. There's real value in introducing AI to business, because so much of modern business is already software. Collecting data, analyzing it, and taking action on it over and over again in a loop. Businesses also control their data, and they can demand that all of their databases work together. In this way, software brand has ruled the business world for a long time, and AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before, for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. The absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It's not being creative. But, not everything is business. Not everything is a loop. And the entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That's the limit of software brain. That's why people hate AI. It flattens them. Regular people don't see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I'm a full-on smart home sicko. The lights and shades and climate controls of this house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple and Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation. And they just don't. AI isn't going to fix that. Most people aren't collecting data about every single thing they do. And if they're collecting any at all, it's stored across lots of different systems. Your email and Gmail, your messages and iMessage, your work schedule and Outlook, your workouts and Peloton. Those systems don't talk to each other. And they maybe never will because there's no reason for them to. And asking people to connect them all freaks them out. Even taking the time to consider how much of your life is captured in databases makes people unhappy. No one wants to be surveilled constantly, and especially not in a way that makes tech companies even more powerful. But getting everything in a database so that software can see it is a preoccupation of the AI industry. It's why all the meeting systems have AI note takers in them now. It's why Canva, which is a design software tool, now connects to corporate email systems. My friend Ezra Klein just went to Silicon Valley and described the people there as actively trying to flatten themselves into a database. Here's what he said, quote, You might think the AI types in Silicon Valley, flush with cash, are on top of the world right now. I found them notably insecure. And so they are racing one another to fully integrate AI into their lives and into their companies. But that doesn't just mean using AI. It means making themselves legible to the AI. You can give it access to everything that's there, your files, your email, your calendar, your messages. The more of your life you open to AI, the more valuable the AI becomes. I've reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software, to turn themselves into a database, is a doomed idea. It's an act so big, I can't imagine a reward that would make it worth it for anyone. Even if the tech industry wasn't constantly talking about how AI will eliminate all the jobs and require a wholesale rethinking of the social contract and oops, also the latest models might cause catastrophic cybersecurity problems that might lead to the end of the world. Does this sound like a good deal to you? Can you market your way out of this? This only makes sense if you have software brain, if your operative framework is to flatten everything into databases that you can control with structured language. The people paying thousands of dollars a month to set up swarms of open-claw agents and write thousands of lines of code, they're people who look at the world and see opportunities for automation, to repeat tasks, to collect data and build software. AI is great for them. It's even exciting in ways that I think are important and will probably change our relationship to computers forever. For everyone else, AI is just a demanding slot monster. It's a threat. Look, I'm not saying regular people don't use Excel and Airtable to plan their weddings, or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won't be useful to people over time. I think a lot of people enjoy data and tracking different parts of their lives. There's my whoop band. I'm just saying these things aren't everything, that not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized. It shouldn't be. The tech industry is rushing forward to put AI everywhere at enormous cost, energy, emissions, manufacturing capacity, the ability to buy RAM, locked into the narrow framework of software brain. Without realizing, they are also asking people to be fundamentally less human. Then they're sitting around, wondering why everyone hates them. I don't think a couple of haircuts are going to fix it. That's the Decoder. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at the verge.com. We really do read all the emails, or you can hit me up directly on threads or blue sky. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe or your podcast. Decoder is a production of The Verge, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll see you next time.

Speaker 6:
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