Innovation and tech isn’t as easy as it looks
Recent failures reveal an often forgotten truth: innovation is slow and software is difficult
Technology was starting to look easy. Too easy. And then Elon Musk bought Twitter. And Bing and Google flung out their spins on ChatGPT. And ransomware took down Royal Mail, a software fault grounded BA flights, and the same happened across domestic US flights.
Before Musk bought Twitter, I was bewildered that a site with hundreds of millions of active users – rather than the billions of Facebook or TikTok – had 7,500 staff and still managed to be so terrible at battling bots, fascism and spam. I take it back: it probably needed double the number of employees.
Musk has learned this the hard way. After buying the site for $44 billion, he slashed staff numbers and then tried to roll out features such as paid-for accounts. Trying to do more with less is obviously a challenge, but Twitter turns out to be harder to run than anyone thought. Well, anyone other than software engineers, app developers and Jack Dorsey.
There have been lots of other tech stumbles of late. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been praised for its abilities and damned for its failures. Teaching AI to spit out text that’s readable and also accurate is hard – it has to be trained on our output, and (as I noted last month) we’re not always well written or factual ourselves. Some of those fired from Twitter were battling disinformation and misinformation, after all.
Wary of the impact of OpenAI’s generative AI on search, Google and Microsoft both unveiled their own generative AI search chatbots. Embarrassingly, Google’s Bard launch was overshadowed by a mistake it made about space photography, which sparked a nosedive in shares for parent company Alphabet, wiping $100 billion off its market value.
That’s an awfully expensive charge for a misunderstanding about exoplanets.
Microsoft’s OpenAI-powered Bing had an even harder time of it, with so many hilarious mistakes coming from its search chatbot that a Reddit thread popped up to capture them. The best example is an argument with a user that begins with Bing not knowing a new Avatar film has been released – fair enough – before confidently stating that the year is 2022 and then abusing the human user as “difficult” for failing to trust the machine.
It must be a tough slog developing such challenging AI projects: years of hard, cutting-edge work from the industry’s best and brightest, and your system still doesn’t know what year it is. Even Bing’s old-school search could answer that.
All this is a timely reminder that though tech innovation feels high speed, it’s often built at a pedestrian pace. The problem isn’t the people developing the tech – they’re geniuses, as far as I’m concerned – but the CEOs and PR departments hyping unready creations so they can be perceived to be ahead of the pack.
Software is hard. I don’t understand how the ones and zeros of binary make typing into this Google Doc possible, let alone anything more complicated. It’s worth remembering this when companies promise big but then fail to deliver – and when you’re frustrated that you can’t send mail abroad because Royal Mail fell over after a cyberattack, or you can’t catch a flight after an app stalled.
The same follows when governments talk about tech solutions; they often just assume software engineers can code away serious social problems. Can’t run exams because of Covid lockdowns? An algorithm can make up final grades. Don’t know who to let out of overcrowded jails? Ask AI. Want to protect children from adult material
Years of hard, cutting-edge work from the industry’s best and brightest, and your system still doesn’t know what year it is
If MPs and CEOs can’t make or explain a solution themselves, they can hardly expect coders to build an answer that works
online? Just get the techies to magic up a solution. But if MPs and CEOs can’t make or explain a solution themselves, they can hardly expect coders to build an answer that works. Code doesn’t simplify, it complicates.
It’s easy to forget how hard software is to get right because so much of it works incredibly well. Microsoft is my reminder: I forget that Windows even exists until it breaks, crashes or needs updates. I might want to chuck my laptop out of the window on occasion, but the rest of the time it works as well as any other appliance in my flat. I think about it as often as I do my toaster, and I forget how much effort has gone into making it possible to check messages, work from home and talk to anyone in the world (who has internet access, at least) with ease.
We’re so far into the information revolution that we forget how truly revolutionary it is. After all, we’re only now starting to see working from home become the norm. Innovation is a long game. We’re in the early days, especially with AI but even with social media, apps and the software we use daily. Laugh all you want at Twitter and generative AI slipups, and curse Microsoft all you like, but don’t let the accomplishments of industry front-liners make it look too easy. Tech is still hard work.