Edition 3
Web3, AI, and fast fashion folly! Oh my!
Welcome to the third weekly edition of Nowism.
News
Web3 Still Won’t Die
I was at London TechWeek this week where many words were spoken but nothing was said. Rishi Sunak epitomized the spirit of the event expressing lofty hopes for AI and Web3, seemingly rooted in no understanding of what they were or meant, which is quite reasonable in the case of Web3. I was quoted in The Telegraph for suggesting that the UK’s Tech Policy was based on someone finding some old Wired magazines.
I’m a little disappointed to see Web3 brought up again as I’d hoped it was all behind us. The broader world of Tech went a bit nuts in 2021; Crypto, the Metaverse, NFTs, SPACs, Clubhouse, Cameo, DAOs, and Web3 all seemed to be things people would delete blog posts about and move on from hoping to never be reminded about later. All those except for killer ones like this which destroyed Web3 at the time.
I do get rather angry about technology or thinking that’s disconnected from reality, naïve, complex, and unhelpful. I'm a passionate believer in being more ambitious in the use of what we already have. Everyone always seems obsessed with the next big thing, but completely disinterested in the huge potential of what we have in our hands already.
Therefore, this week a LOT of my energy went into writing this post. It’s a big piece combining the real potential of Web2 thinking to make the world better, how software should work around people, and how mega apps and threading could allow us to make a better web. But the piece starts with how stupid Web3 is (or was) and how people lied and retold the history of the Web to make Web3 seem inevitable, rather than random.
Meanwhile, this was a good piece on the handful of changes from the Pandemic era which are in some ways carrying on. There are not many.
AI There!
McKinsey & Company on Thursday said generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion worth of annual productivity globally, which I think instinctively feels sensible, especially compared to the time they said the Metaverse would add $5 trillion by 2030.
There are a few issues with this.
What is AI exactly?
Like all new technologies, what starts as something quite specific, such as connected sensors or bigger databases, rapidly becomes a meaningless marketing term, such as "the internet of things" or "big data." As a result, these concepts become bigger, more interesting, and more profound, but ultimately impossible to define. In the same way that "big data" meant knowing more things, AI is rapidly becoming "doing smarter things," which is generally impossible to measure the impact of.We use tech wrong.
Recent history suggests that almost all new technology not only fails to save time, but actually ends up wasting it. While smartphones can be used to teach us, French, they can also be a source of distraction with funny videos and social media. In fact, tools that can have a massive impact on productivity, such as Excel, collaborative documents, and better use of digital calendars, are often overlooked because implementing change takes time.
But for a proper analysis look at this by Jeffrey Funk.
Meanwhile, in other AI news, can Chatbots be guilty of defamation? Can call center workers become interior designers? Why is AI flooding Etsy with crap?
Can AI let me talk to my car like Knightrider soon?
Thread Alert - Fashion’s Gonna Fashion
Fashion Retail is interesting these days because disruption cycles are fast and getting faster. H&M and Zara introduced fast fashion to take on dusty high street brands, going from two seasons per year to 52 “micro seasons,” and making agile, responsive, data-led supply chains to distribute clothes.
Shein came in from nowhere and asked why make and distribute clothing rapidly when you could list 10,000 new items per day and only make and ship what people were buying at scale. Rather than buyers, let’s have consumers essentially A/B/C/ZZZZ test our entire range. Despite a generation of young consumers claiming to want to support companies that take care of the people and planet, clothes flown in from China, that fall apart after being made in sweatshop conditions are fine if cheap enough.
Now Shein is facing a threat from Temu, who is winning the online traffic battle but also losing $30 per order sending you things that are so cheap that when they end up being unwearable, you can’t be bothered to send them back.
Meanwhile, Google has launched an AI-assisted photorealistic virtual try-on service for clothing. According to Google, the simulation looks more realistic than ever as it shows how clothing drapes, folds, clings, stretches, and wrinkles. This service is designed to reduce barriers to purchase and lower return rates. However, as someone who wears between M and XXL T-shirts at Zara, I tend to think we should focus far more on making clothes that are the size they say they are. I've been told, even in the era of AI, this is near impossible.
Things I liked this week
One of the strangest antitrust cases around looks to be ending slowly. It turns out it’s OK for your retailer to have a vague sense of what your home’s floor plan is and make vacuums.
Instead of simply creating better ads, companies are continually finding more sophisticated ways to place them. For example, LinkedIn recently announced that it will allow marketers to target LinkedIn users while they're watching movies and TV shows on streaming services.
An old piece on how artists keep on buying rights to use radical new colors.
I’ll never be able to stop writing about how interesting the car market is now, and how much it’s becoming like the phone industry. Now Foxconn, the largest maker of phones on the planet, is moving to make cars.
This report from McKinsey shows pricing is the most important thing in food right now.
Cultivated meat isn’t happening any time soon, so that won’t fix the cost of the food crisis.
Meanwhile in Cannes next week, I predict here that nobody will talk about anything that matters.
Toyota makes a fake manual gearbox for an automatic car.
What I’m doing
This summer, I've had the pleasure of meeting many fascinating and brilliant people in London. Many of them have expressed interest in actively contributing to the innovation consulting work we deliver at All We Have Is Now. Stay tuned for more information on how we plan to connect exceptional talent to truly exciting work with amazing clients.
This coming week, I’ll be in Cannes and will share my observations in next week’s fourth edition of this newsletter.
My team and I are experimenting with voice and podcasting tools to launch an audio supplement of Nowism, which we plan to release soon.