Does the AI industry have a culture?

Past tech waves, from ridesharing to crypto, have had solid identities and cultures, even if embarrassing ones. Does AI even have one?

Good morning everyone. Before I get into my piece: if you’re in San Francisco this week, we’re hosting a mezcal tasting Thursday (tomorrow) at Mosto in the Mission. I’d totally be there if I could, but if you want to unwind after work, come by to meet the team and other people in media and civic tech!

And then on December 2nd, I will be at a comedy event we’re hosting in New York City that you won’t want to miss. Comedian Nathan Macintosh often closes out Comedy Cellar (meaning, he’s the funniest of the funniest). Spots are limited, so please RSVP if you want to “convulse with laughter” (per a New York Times review of him) and meet other technologists, entrepreneurs, journalists, ethicists–and of course the Hard Reset team.

Anyway: last week, I represented Hard Reset at an event called Web Summit. Web Summit is a Lisbon-based conference for tech founders, tech companies, and the media, all with a bit of a European angle.

The heavy-hitters gave keynotes: the Chief Executive of Boston Dynamics demonstrated his trotting dog-robot, while the President of Microsoft, Brad Smith, proclaimed (with a straight face) that tech companies don’t actually need laws to give them permission to do the right thing. Tennis player Maria Sharapova sat on stage with IBM to discuss AI’s usage in player management and for fans in their predictions and outcomes. And there were others talking about AI in movie production, in healthcare and life sciences, in the law, in customer service, and in journalism. AI was everywhere.

The main stage was a full-on production with flashing neon lights and high-energy walk-on music for many people I had never heard of before. And this was not the first time I’d been in an auditorium for a tech conference that resembled a mega-church, or maybe an EDM concert. In 2015, I went to the gathering for Uber employees in Las Vegas, where Travis Kalanick paced the floor of the stage in a doctor’s coat dictating the company’s cultural values, like how it was important to “step on other people’s toes” to get things done.

Then there were the conferences during the brief but flashy e-scooter era. Congregated at these events were an eclectic mix of technologists dreaming of autonomous vehicles to urban planning nerds hoping that this cash infusion into scooters would usher in more cyclist-friendly streets. And of course there were the infamous crypto conferences, where some attendees made a point to boast that they only ate steak, or that they were the targets of kidnapping schemes because of how much money they had on their crypto wallets.

Conferences are always a bit manic, especially when you have no idea what time zone it is and there are 70,000 attendees to navigate. But after the first day at Web Summit I left the day feeling energetically drained and even a little depressed, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Was I not putting enough work into earnestly networking? Was it residual jetlag? Was it the impending rain in a usually sunny Portugal?

It eventually got better and I met some fascinating people, but I still wanted to understand why I was so drained that first day. When I first started putting down my thoughts about all of this, I started to write something along the lines of: at this Web Summit, the friction between human culture and AI culture is viscerally apparent. I was thinking specifically about this one talk, where a Newsweek journalist was interviewing an Senegalese content creator about his creative process. This Newsweek interviewer just could not compute that this creator apparently didn’t use some suite of AI productivity tools to fuel his work or imagination. Any time he would say something deeply human like “I do this work because I love it and I take it day by day,” or “I don’t know what the future holds,” she would drill down on “But what is your BUSINESS strategy!? What TOOLS do you use!” At one point, it got so uncomfortable that the audience just started giggling at this dynamic.

As I started to write “there is friction between human culture and AI culture,” I was having a hard time with the line. I know what various forms of human cultures are. But the more I stared at the phrase “AI culture,” I couldn’t actually understand what that was or how to describe it.

I asked a psychiatrist friend why I may be feeling this way, and he texted me something simple yet it felt so profound and obvious: that the more we try to make AI become more human, the more humans seem to be acting like AI.

It was true that there seemed to be a distinct culture or personality lacking at this conference that had been present in other tech “revolutions,” even if those were bizarre and full of hubris. Before turning to whistleblower work and writing, I’d seen various phases of tech disruptions that each seemed to have their own distinct cultures. In the early days at Uber, there was this blind desire to win no matter the cost, and to party like everyone was still in a frat or sorority. During my three grueling months at a blockchain startup felt like everyone had a chip on their shoulder, something to prove to the world. There were familiar human personalities and egos to all of them.

But here, it was different. Not only was there a seriousness to all of the AI talks (the closest that the conference came to humor in the talks I saw was a fireside chat with the podcaster Jameela Jamil about failure and embarrassment, not words or themes in the lexicon of any other speaker.) But there was a sense of security and calm in the AI developments that were being pitched, whether data centers or products for our personal use.

This felt unlike every other tech industry or revolution where I observed a nervous urgency to some of these pitches, an energy from founders and CEOs that they were underdogs disrupting something entrenched. Here, there was a static energy and a tone of inevitability in how people spoke–as if it were a foregone conclusion that AI is the future, that there was no need for these business leaders or technologists to do anything other than unemotionally state the obvious.

I started discussing this with a journalist over red wine at dinner, and an observation she made clicked for me: that she wanted to get some swag or merch from one of the AI companies, to have something physical like a cap or sweatshirt to remember the beginning of the AI revolution. But after searching for such merch, she says couldn’t find any.

It dawned on me that maybe there just is no culture in AI. This is not to say that the conference was just a sea of lobotomized. There were journalists, creatives, brain scientists, entrepreneurs, scientists, politicians–a lot of very intelligent and conventionally accomplished people. One talk discussed AI’s potential for life-saving drug discovery, which seems like an actually important and useful application.

I missed this other talk, but someone told me about a creative technologist who developed the viral MAGA ballroom 2028 AI video (if you haven’t seen it, it’s a depiction of Donald Trump and his inner circle eating caviar in his gilded ballroom while all of his supporters drown in debt and literally drown in climate change; they become so fed up that they revolt and storm the ballroom ushering an era of “healing.”)

So there is some creativity and soul and emotion brimming under the surface in some corners of this ecosystem, when you look past the “privileged and confidential” keynote presentations that have been flogged and flattened to death by comms people and lawyers. But it’s different than in eras and tech waves past.

The opening remarks from the Mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas, were especially interesting to me, because they flipped the script in most of the keynotes that presented this inevitable . He essentially said that Lisbon has already become a hub for tech and startups (and money)–but that now, he wanted it to become a hub for culture: film, fine art, music, the performing arts. His hope, he said, was that the surge of tech innovation brought into Lisbon over the past few years can enable and complement this human culture.

That all remains to be seen, but I think his overarching message may be the key. That we don’t try to create a culture around AI, because it frankly may never exist. The key is maybe to stubbornly commit to what makes us human as AI rolls out around us.

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