For the last couple of years, there’s been a strange kind of masochism in the way journalists cover Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer conference.
We saw it again today. All across tech media, coders, journalists, and creatives breathlessly live-tweeted the keynote, fawning over every Gemini demo and AI-powered assistant that writes, codes, designs, and does whatever the hell else for you, as if we’re not the very people this technology is being built to replace. There’s almost a performative thrill to it: Watch this machine do my job faster than I can. Incredible!
Among the highlights: Project Astra can call the bike shop for you (whew, there’s 30 seconds I can get back). Google Beam projects your 3D self into a video call. Android XR glasses bring your chatbot assistant literally into your field of vision. And some other things that are probably just vaporware at this point and may even stay that way. It was all, at least to me, as ridiculous as watching a supervillain lay out their master plan, while the crowd happily laps it up because the lasers look cool.
There must have been a memo I didn’t get, because we seem to have gone from “AI is coming for your job” to “AI will take your job, but you get to write a glowing blog post about it first.” I can think of no other explanation for the complete absence of even an iota of critical thought reflected in the coverage of this year’s I/O keynote, presented by a tech giant under fire on multiple legal fronts for causing incalculable damage as a search and advertising monopoly — and yet the blob keeps coming, continuing to set its sights on everything even remotely human, from conversation to collaboration, creativity, and presence.
Google clearly has no shame, as shown by the $249/month Gemini Ultra subscription, which feels like a bet that enough people will pay to become obsolete. And don’t get me started on Google Search, which now has an “AI Mode” that’s separate from your garden variety version of Search that — wait for it — has been algorithmically juiced and run on machine learning for all these years. Or perhaps we’re to conclude that OG Google Search really has been as random as it’s all seemed, even as it acquired a monopoly share of the web search market and then proceeded to drive waves of publishers out of business as it lurched from one traffic-killing Search update to the next.
“The opportunity with AI is truly as big as it gets,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai raved in a blog post today. “And it will be up to this wave of developers, technology builders and problem solvers to make sure its benefits reach as many people as possible. And it’s especially inspiring to think about the research we’re working on today that will become the foundation of tomorrow’s reality, from robotics to quantum, AlphaFold and Waymo.”
The only thing more dystopian than the tech at these Google keynotes is the applause it all gets. If you write, code, illustrate, direct, or communicate for a living, today’s keynote wasn’t about product reveals; it was a preemptive eulogy. For a lot of people.
Maybe we can ask Gemini to write the obit. I hear it’s getting good at that sort of thing.
