Welcome back to our weekly feature, The Future in 5 Questions. This week I spoke with Rich Jaroslovsky, a veteran of digital media and former tech columnist who is now vice president for content at SmartNews, an app that algorithmically evaluates and curates the news for its users. We spoke about the hype cycle around generative AI, how it will make media literacy even more crucial, and the inevitability that there are some problems technology just can’t solve. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity and length: What’s one underrated big idea? The fact that technology can be used to overcome social divisions rather than just exacerbate them. I'd love to see more work done on how to optimize technology and information to expose people more to differing viewpoints and puncture filter bubbles, which is something we've been trying to do at SmartNews for quite a while. What that takes is not necessarily further technological advancement, but the intent to wield that technology responsibly. Technology is just a tool, like a hammer. The hammer doesn't know whether it's being used to drive a nail to build a Habitat for Humanity house or whether it's being used to hit someone over the head. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? Generative AI, at least at this moment. There tends to be a pattern with the introduction of major new technologies — whether it's the internet, blockchain, or now AI — where there's this period of irrational exuberance where people expect it to solve all the world's ills, then inevitably, the bubble deflates. Then the pendulum sometimes has a tendency to swing too far in the other direction, which is when people figure out what the actual best applications of the technology are. The internet really was revolutionary but it took a while to figure out what it was really best for. What book most shaped your conception of the future? “The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder. One of the lessons I took from that book was that the course that technology takes isn't just a function of scientific achievement and cold logic, it's both created and deployed by humans, with all our passions and frailties, and foibles and conflicts and possibilities. The fundamental lesson I took from the book is that technology is at least as powerful a reflector of society as it is a shaper of it. What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? It's absolutely imperative that the government does more at every level to promote information literacy and critical thinking. We have to do more, and to start at a very early age, to educate kids and give them the skills and tools they need to judge the credibility of the information they'll encounter online. Government could do more to incentivize, and in some cases, to carefully regulate the use of technology to at least maximize the chances that it's being used responsibly. Note that I didn't say to make sure it's being used responsibly, because, the nature of technological progress is that it's almost always going to outstrip our ability to come to terms with its implications. Still, when it comes to issues like data privacy, the U.S. is lagging far behind. We should be at the forefront of figuring out the implications of generative AI and what its responsible use requires — disclosure when it's being used, and watermarking of AI-generated information. We need to be more active than we are to address the implications of this tech. What has surprised you most this year? The sudden explosion of public awareness and interest about generative AI. This is after all the work that's gone on for years, but we're clearly right now in a moment where the broader public is waking up to the technology and its implications. For somebody who's been around as long as I have, this feels an awful lot like the mid-90s when the web began to penetrate public consciousness. I teach a course in the history of online news at the University of California, and one of the things I always emphasize to my students is how swiftly the web went from mystery to ubiquity. I show them a clip from the Today Show where the hosts are sitting around on camera going, what is this internet thing, anyway? What is that “at” symbol, what does it mean? Within three years there are commercials touting the supposed technological superiority of DSL over cable in getting broadband to your home. The web went from totally obscure to completely ubiquitous, and it feels like we are in that moment right now with AI.
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