Matthew Prince

The first thing is that the answer isn't to fight progress.

Answer engines are a better experience for users.

If you think about sci-fi films, which predict a lot of our future, when you ask the helpful robot, what's the temperature outside?

It didn't say, well, here are 10 links that you could follow to figure out what the temperature is outside.

It told you what the temperature was, right?

If you ask it for what's the recipe, it told you what the recipe was.

That's the interface that makes the most sense for the future.

But what that does is it changes the underlying business model of the web.

And so what we're seeing from people who are selling media as their primary business,

is that they're seeing massive drop-offs in the amount of ad revenue that they're getting.

They're seeing massive drop-offs in the amount of subscription revenue that they're getting.

And as that revenue dries up, it's going to put increasing pressure on content creators.

Fewer and fewer people are going to be willing to actually create content if there's not a business model for it.

And so what I think is, you know, there's sort of the nihilistic outcome, what we just say, you know, anyone who's creating content, like, you know, starts to death and dies.

Like that's a horrible, you know, potential outcome.

There's sort of the black mirror outcome, which is that,

You know, we don't go back to the sort of media of the 1980s, but we go back to the media of the 1400s, which is the Medici's, where there are five powerful families that unless you kind of are under the patronage of one of them, you don't get to do any research.

But instead of families, it would be five big AI companies.

where you've got one that's conservative and one that's liberal, and there'll be a Chinese one, and there'll be an Indian one.

Those are incredibly regressive outcomes.