Q&A: ‘AI is the internet’, says Kara Swisher

Is big tech getting too big? What influence will the industry have over lawmakers in the future? How will AI transform the way businesses operate? These are some of the questions we put to Kara Swisher, a veteran technology journalist who closely watches Silicon Valley.

Swisher has been one of the more prominent voices criticizing the excesses of tech in recent years. She argues that big firms will never innovate if they are allowed to get big and stamp out the competition, and predicted U.S. regulators would propose that Google should be broken up. 

“The only way we solve problems” in society, Swisher said, is through “innovation from below.”

When it comes to AI, Swisher urges everyone to take advantage of the current moment, where tools are being provided for free or relatively cheaply as big tech companies like OpenAI and Google try to corner the market

Now is the time, Swisher contends, to build a business on the back of a large language model (LLM) or AI tool - for healthcare, journalism, and other industries to find a way to harness AI to become more efficient and innovative.

As to whether AI is coming for more of our jobs, Swisher replied: “Maybe there are some jobs people shouldn’t do.”

The interview with Swisher was filmed at Trust Conference 2024, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual flagship forum, where she joined a panel alongside Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and Thomson Reuters President and CEO Steve Hasker to discuss tech-enabled threats to global democracy.

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Transcript: 

You’re in touch with a lot of tech CEOs. What do you think is the main misconception that the public has about these people?

There's this idea that there's big tech. I was just arguing with someone the other day, I was like, ‘There's no such thing.’ There's big technology companies and they're all different. There's different tech leaders, some are terrific and some are trying their best, some are terrible.

So I think lumping them all into one category is not useful. You have to figure out who is willing to compromise and understand they have to pay their full freight, and who just wants to amass power. And so I think we tend to try to make them into cartoon characters and they're very much more complex.

They're also not that smart compared to you and I. They aren't. They just aren't. They're not special. They're just rich. At this point, many of them.

You hear a lot of people in Silicon Valley complain that they can't do mergers. I’m wondering if that is a real concern?

It’s a concern to them because they want to get bigger. Sure. And they want to cross every single boundary. But we've been there before in our country, whether it was telecommunications or railroads or chicken farmers.

You know, more competition is better for innovation, period. Full stop. They do not want more competition because it's more expensive, but they are never going to innovate if they're too big. It's just not happening, and they're worth more when you break them up, by the way. Google broken up is worth more than Google together.

Do you think they're going to try to break Google up? Do you think that's going to be one of the remedies.

Yeah, probably. You can't control both sides of a market and with a straight face you can't do that. There's no ability to have a real transaction if you control both sides of a market and it just makes perfect sense to normal people.

We should get everything out of the way for all kinds of startups, not just tech startups, so that people can apply entrepreneurism throughout our society to solve problems. That's the only way we get out of problems is through innovation from below. Or we could be China and do it from out of the top down. That works too in many ways. But the reason the US has been out in the forefront of all of this is because of innovation from the ground up.

These companies are paying the cost of this, so why not start to use their free tools to create our own businesses. It used to be the government paid for the internet or the roads or whatever, and then people built businesses upon that.

Let's build some businesses at their expense. So if you're an insurance company of some sort, how can you use generative AI for your business if you're you know, if you’re a law firm, how do you do it? Why not figure out something for yourself.

Won’t that recreate some of the problems we have, like, you know, third party sellers on Amazon, where there's a choke point, and we’re relying on them?

We don't know what this is yet. It's like saying, what is the internet in 1999, would you have envisioned Uber? No, no. You don't know what you don't know. So let's let it happen. Let's let that innovation happen at the expense of big companies, tech companies.

I'd like more competition. I love competition. I think, even among big companies, it's better for everybody. There was no innovation in search after Google won, ever. Why? And Google didn't [innovate], and now it's being disrupted itself because it never innovated beyond its core product.

It gets worse, [Google search] is way worse than it was ten years ago.

Yes, that's right. There was never a reason to innovate if there's no competitors. The only reason you innovate is because someone's catching up to you.

So one of your mantras is ‘If it can be digitized, it will be digitized.’ What isn’t digitized now that will be digitized soon?

It's just a process of getting more and more and then turbocharging it through generative AI. I think everything has, information has moved almost entirely online. At the same time, we're creating more data than ever before. And that's that's why generative AI has taken off the way it has.

We've got compute power with more data than ever with money, and then it creates where we are right now. And so, you know, there's nothing that can't be digitized. I mean, we'll be digitizing everything. I mean, I think we're going to be printing organs at some point, so.

You do?

Yeah, why not? They're making meat right now in the lab. Why not? Sure. There's all kinds of health care stuff that's pretty amazing. It's going to be further - that's an area that hasn't been digitized that much. So it’s a great area for for digitization.

What do you think of that kind of corner of the discourse that you hear often where people say like, basically AI is vastly overrated?

I was around for the beginning of the internet. They said the same thing. They're wrong. Yeah, this is another Cambrian explosion.

So we got the internet, what are we going to use it for? I don't know. What are we going to use email for? Well not mail. So yeah, it’s something else.

I mean there's kind of a question of like, is AI like crypto or is AI the internet, right?

AI is the internet. Bigger, better, bigger, more.

You know, I think news organizations also could use this opportunity to innovate their business models, and that might be some very hard decisions going forward. At the same time, we're not going to keep going the way you're going.

It's a road to nowhere. And so how can you use it, instead of being scared of it or being overly a cheerleader, what's the use case for each of your businesses with AI? Like we're using it to translate our podcast into many languages. Now, I'm sure we don't have many, I don't know, Ethiopian listeners necessarily, but it's at no cost to us.

Do you think the discourse about like taking jobs is just fear mongering?

No, I think it's complicated. I just I think, you know what? We used to have individual farms. 70% of people worked on farms. Now it's 2%.

We have to figure out what the jobs are going forward. And maybe there's some jobs people shouldn't do. There's lots of jobs people shouldn't do. We're not here to make work for people. It's figuring out jobs that are creative and interesting and move somewhere forward.

Things change. Welcome to the world.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.