Survival Is Becoming a Subscription Service

In a world of abundant intelligence, the problems are "open-source" and the solutions are "as-a-service."

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Are you willing to accept more risk? I spoke to the Financial Times’ Isabel Berwick about how failure is becoming the new normal at work and in business.

Change is likely to be a constant: “the environment is so adaptive, [every business solution is] not going to work for very long. It’s going be copied really quickly, or lose its potency very quickly.”

…In Dror’s telling, the link between our efforts and their likely reward is going to be broken💰. “In a lot of white-collar work, we assume that if everyone tries harder, or we’ll change some policy, then we’ll go back to the 1950s and everything will be wonderful and everyone will have a stable job.” He thinks we haven’t yet “internalised” this change. (Speaking for myself, I think he’s right 🫣.)

The whole piece is worth reading, and if you’re an FT subscriber, Isabel’s Working It newsletter is a must.

The idea of an extremely adaptive environment points to a bigger shift that extends beyond work: Life itself is about to become one big subscription service. We’ll have access to incredible new services, cures, protections, and enhancements. Over time, access to these services could become essential to our health, safety, and livelihoods.

I am not talking about standard technological dependence. What I have in mind is a more specific and systematic dynamic.

Consider what happened this month when researchers used AI to expose critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers WordPress and much of the web. When public fixes were released on October 21, Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, announced that sites hosted on its platforms were already protected. Its security team had prepared ahead of the release. People running their own servers were told to update immediately.

We’re seeing something similar in battlefields in Ukraine and over Israel and Iran: each side is constantly pioneering new algorithms, new types of swarms, and new design changes in order to land more drones and missiles. And in response, air defenders are constantly adapting their own algorithms and swarms, with AI playing a growing role in both attack and defense.

Now imagine this cycle spreading into more areas of life, with new threats and new defenses arriving every day, or even every few minutes. In a world where powerful open-source AI is available to anyone, we are going to see the constant emergence of new threats and new solutions.

Cyberattacks and drone wars are dramatic. But the same dynamic also applies to almost any other process where one side wants to get something, and the other side wants to make sure that it doesn’t. You might be trying to get your content exposed on the algorithm on TikTok. You might be trying to match with your next date or future wife. Whatever the goal, it is very likely that some algorithm can help you achieve it and that another algorithm can undermine your efforts or support your opponent.

Each of us will be able to pay for an AI model in order to defend our existing interests and pursue our goals. At the same time, each of us will be forced to constantly respond to new types of threats and challenges. These could threaten our safety or health, but also our business, the attention we get from others, the quality of our sleep, and a variety of other things that technology will affect in ways we cannot even imagine.

Life was never a walk in the park, and we all have to constantly respond and adapt to new challenges every day, even without AI. The difference here is the intensity and the speed at which this will happen. Life will become a steady flow of new threats, requiring a steady flow of new adaptations.

Some of these solutions will also be open-source. But a freely available solution is useful only if it reaches you in time. Someone has to monitor emerging threats, test the defenses, and put them to work. As the cycle accelerates, more of us will depend on organizations that can do this continuously, on our behalf.

Life in such a world could be extraordinary. Medicine could adapt to our changing bodies. Defenses could anticipate dangers we would never notice ourselves. A small business could find precisely the customers who need it. We could become healthier, safer, and more capable.

But enjoying these possibilities will require ongoing access to the systems that deliver them. Their cost, who pays, and what happens when someone loses access will become increasingly important questions.

Have a great weekend.