From the Editor’s Desk: Messier (Premium)

My earliest memories of personal computing included seeing Commodore VIC-20 and 64 computers in a retail store, possibly Sears, and being instantly struck by the possibilities, an itch that became a life-long focus. But in those days, personal computing was just starting to move out of its hobbyist phase and into mainstream acceptance. And friendly new products from companies like Apple, Atari, Commodore, TI, and others vied for our attention and our dollars.

Today, personal computing is so pervasive that it’s almost hard to describe. Almost all of us walk around with an always-connected supercomputer in our pockets, we interact with any number of smart devices every day at home or out in the world, and significant portions of the population consider work to be something that takes place in front of a screen, keyboard, and mouse. Often at home.

Personal computing’s ascendance was probably inevitable, but for those of us who witnessed this era unfold, it is interesting that most of the personal technology companies from the late 1970s and early 1990s are long gone. Also interesting: two of them—Apple and Microsoft—are literally the two biggest companies in the world right now by market capitalization. (Six of the top 10 companies by market cap are technology firms.)

There are various takeaways to those realities, among them that market consolidation is natural and perhaps unavoidable. But Apple and Microsoft couldn’t have survived all these years, let alone thrived, had they not been able to adapt to industry changes. And in both cases, some kind of defeat paved the way to those adaptations: a near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s in Apple’s case and back-to-back antitrust problems in Microsoft’s in the early 2000s. Had these companies just continued down their once-successful paths, they’d have been acquired themselves or would have simply dwindled and then disappeared.

Sitting here over 15 years into what I still think of as the mobile era, it’s starting to look like we’re in for another period of upheaval in personal technology. In some ways, it feels overdue. Mobile has contracted into two dominant platforms, both terrible and anti-competitive. Search was decided so long ago no one even bothers to try other services anymore. Everything is a subscription service now, fulfilling the threats in end-user license agreements from decades ago that we didn’t actually own anything we purchased anyway. And social media has wreaked havoc with both civility and democracy, spreading lies and misinformation while tracking our every move online.

This is not the world that young Paul imagined 40 years ago. But it, too, was perhaps inevitable given that so much science fiction is about dystopian futures in which corporations replaced governments. It seems like we’re moving in that direction, too. Technology moves so quickly, the theory goes, that governments and regulations can’t keep up. And so now most of us are just tiny mammals scurrying between the big dinosaur legs of Big Tech, hoping we don’t get trampled. The top technology firms today are bigger and more powerful than most governments, like they’re too big and too complex to be regulated.

But the asteroid always comes from somewhere. And in this case, the asteroid that may reshuffle the deck yet again and cast aside those companies that are too intractable to change is Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technology so powerful that even its makers don’t fully understand it. Derided as “autocomplete on steroids” by critics in denial, AI will nonetheless shake up our worlds and spit them out on the other side, and the only question is what will be left. Jobs will be lost, industries may disappear, and everything will change. And as with all such shifts, the only question will be whether the good outweighs the bad.

Despite my reputation for negativity, which I find undeserved, I’m hopeful that the good will outweigh the bad. And I will simply point to previous technological breakthroughs, where even a nuanced view of their impact generally shows this to be the case. Put simply, two steps forward, one step back is still progress.

More specifically, AI will inject much-needed change into an industry that was otherwise going nowhere fast, with Big Tech behemoths doing nothing to evolve and everything they can to protect their dominant businesses. Though it will do so with the subtlety of an explosion, AI will at least end the stagnation. Yes, what will appear after the dust settles will be more consolidation. But in the meantime, things will get messier again, with lots of little players like OpenAI scurrying around and forcing change on giants that have grown soft in their dominance. Personal technology needs this desperately right now.

Sometimes, messier is better.