I recommend Episode 16 of Cobot’s podcast Deployed, in which their CEO Brad Porter interviews John Giannandrea (JG), who recently retired from Apple where he was the SVP of ML and AI Strategy. Before Apple, he was the head of Search and AI at Google.

John was the best boss I ever had, and the only person I followed to a new company. I appreciated John’s integrity, and his humble, strait forward approach that always kept the long view in sight.  Brad and I reported to JG and worked closely together at Tellme Networks… a great company founded on a good idea, years too early.

Futurist Roy Amara famously observed, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

In the late 1990s there were countless companies trying to “get on the Internet.” There was lots of hype, and then many of those companies disappeared. 25 years later our lives have been reshaped in ways that almost no one envisioned: smartphones, continuous connectivity, items purchased online and delivered in hours. This was not an instant transformation. As JG noted, it took 20 years before his dentist let patients manage their appointments online.

AI will bring a bigger transformation than the Internet did… but it will take time for us to see the real transformation. Right now people are expecting massive, immediate changes. Many of these changes won’t last. People will be laid off because AI will “replace them”, only to be hired back when it’s clear the AIs can’t replace them. Large investments will be made and massive data centers will be built. Some of these will be the heart of the future, but others will rot away, unused, because investments were too far ahead of returns. Billions will be spent on building models which will ultimately be replaced by something significantly more powerful and cost effective.

JG regularly reminded me that impact takes time, especially when dealing with large organizations. Back in the days of Tellme, we would rev our product weekly (quickly then, glacially slow by today’s software standards). It seemed like “forever” to wait more than a year for AT&T to add a “simple” feature to the 4ESS switch. And yet, it happened and that change unlocked a large class of customers that were unreachable before the change AT&T made. Change in society takes even longer, but it does happen.

In the interview, JG touched on two themes I have seen repeatedly: there are paradigm-shifting ideas, AND there are long, data-driven, disciplined “hill climbs” required to deliver an impactful product.

The section of the episode that most resonated with me was JG’s observation that

I think that the best technology is, is created with a real genuine humanistic intention to do a good thing. Not as a business idea.

I mourn the Silicon Valley of the previous century, when the focus was mostly on innovation and building things with a positive impact. Today the focus seems to be more on personal achievement and corporate profitability. I wonder whether the modern MBA program is a contributing factor, and I’m not alone in that thought. A LinkedIn post led me to a New York Times opinion piece by Chris Marquis, a professor at the University of Cambridge (previously at Harvard and Cornell), titled I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.

My biggest delight in the interview was a story I hadn’t heard before… JG recounting an encounter with a visiting cardinal from the Catholic Church. A clip from that section of the video

A paraphrase of the exchange:

How do you know that building these technologies is going to be good for humanity?

JG’s characteristic response (which I would note has data behind, found in books like Factfulness by Hans Rosling and Enlightenment Now  by Steven Pinker)

Progress of technology since the Enlightenment… all the measures which show progress in the last 100 years…

And the cardinal’s laughter and reply:

You are running an uncontrolled, 200-year experiment. You have a blind faith that technology is making our lives better, but how do you know?

Finally, JG’s observation:

Oh, I get it. I am talking to the Catholic Church, which is 2,000 years old… they are taking the long view.