May
26
This is what it comes down to, and you can take my word for it. I have been commentating upon the marketplace for information for 40 years now and I know well enough that you no one listens unless you either anticipate the death of something or predict a revolution in something else. No half measures will do. Gradual evolution? Progressive change? These cut no ice with investors or their bankers, or with heritage or legacy businesses or startup entrepreneurs. And unless we have death or revolution, we do not get the angst-ridden, guilt-induced introversion that reflects the middle and senior management of successful, stable and progressive companies in slow changing markets. The threat of death or revolution makes them worried and keeps strategy consultants employed. I have been wonderfully indebted to death or revolution these 40 long years.
This system, so beneficial to consultants, works well as long as we call out the right deaths and name the right revolutions. If we get it wrong then harms far worse than a misguided strategy evaluation could be the result. And now, perhaps , we are in imminent danger of getting it very wrong. We seem to be concentrating upon the localised effects of the application of generative AI in particular to both publishing processes and to the use of AI in new product development. We are also, quite rightly, deeply concerned with data licensing and trying to prop up the copyright conventions that have underpinned the information marketplace for so long.. We do not seem to be looking at the effect of AI more broadly on the users of published information. The equivalent injunction to “follow the money“ in information markets used to be “follow the eyeballs“. Has AI, and what it does for us, had the effect of distracting us from paying total attention to what our users are actually doing – with AI?
Perhaps then we need to look beyond the way in which “death or revolution“ discussions have taken place in the past. surely this whole idea of an information based society in which information creators are served by intermediaries who are value and aggregation before creating commercial relationships with users seems like what it is – the last relic of the Gutenberg age. we need a new model that reflects the dynamic relationships of the network, the complete personalisation and customisation of content as data, and the ability of the ultimate user to add the ultimate values required.
Much of my past 40 years has been spent helping and advising, among others, the publishers of scholarly journals focused on scientific research and discovery. This sector has almost always been a belwether place where signs of the future may be detected. Early and intelligent users of new technologies abound. Big issues include integrity, where AI plays a role on both sides of the equation. Other concerns are focused on processing and it’s costs: AI will be influential here. Relatively fewer people are concerned with an issue which seems to me quite central: every year fewer and fewer researchers are reading original articles. AI summarisation, and the overall increases in article generation have meant that fewer researchers have time or energy to read the bulk of new material published in their discipline. The resulting paradox – more and more articles produced but less less human readers – seems to me to add up to a perfect“death of publishing“ argument. My view, for the past five years, has been that we will create a self publishing environment in which acts of verification, peer review and value estimation take place quite separately from the initial appearance of scholarly findings as self posted articles in pre-print servers, in blogs or in other postings. The commercial activity will not be in publishing, it will be in software and data services.
Another field in which I have found myself working regularly over these years has been in credit reporting and credit rating. Here is a world which seemingly depends upon standards, data frameworks and criteria and strict rules of verification. Companies working in this field have been at pains to build trusted brands which allow users to build faith in their ability to maintain the standards. Tem years ago at a conference in Hong Kong , I argued that intelligent software would one day replace branded services. Today I feel that door is being pushed open, though not yet to the point where trading companies are able to use their own evaluations to create trusted partnerships. But still, the question is now on the table – do we need an intermediary to establish trust between trading partners?
In 1979 I left what was then conventional publishing to start work in a legal information retrieval initiative. A start up in almost every sense of the word. We put the entirety of the laws and statutes, and the historical case law, of the United Kingdom onto a computer and lawyers searched it through a landline and modem. Things change. The world in which I once strived and struggled is no longer about information retrieval, but entirely concerned with the delivery of legal services and solutions. Today’s players make law practices and corporate counsel more effective, but, as has always been the threat, technological change may remove the intermediary. It is not surprising now to find London Magic Circle law practices whose technology is as advanced as that of their technology suppliers. AI does that. it removes the knowledge and power balance between the user and the supplier.
And didn’t it always do that? Is this not the Internet revolution at last coming home to roost? A network of relationships changes those relationships. A virtual network is very different from a real world network. In the late 1990s and in the early years of this century we spoke the language of “disintermediation“. Then we forgot to watch it happening. We see the network effect in our own lives every day. Very old people who clearly recall secretaries and typewriters, younger people who can remember going to see a bank manager, or any of the host of in-person services which have now collapsed into the network . intermediation is ending and a successful navigation of our world is increasingly are driven by the time and effort expended by the individual end user, enabled and increasingly supported by AI. I am not saying that this is wrong or bad: I just want to notice the difference and the way in which AI develops and expands to fit the needs and requirements of ultimate users. It is at least possible that, at some future date, one of the quality of life factors which may be vitally important to each individual, alongside clean air and water, access to electricity and Internet bandwidth, will be the quality of AI available and affordable to each of us.