Month: June 2020

The Impact of AI on Influencer Marketing

The Impact of AI on Influencer Marketing

Digital marketers have to deploy AI. They also have to defeat it In October 2017, Facebook altered the Instagram API to make it harder for users to search its giant database of photos. The change was a small element of the company’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it was a significant problem for parts of the digital marketing industry. Not long before, New York-based influencer marketing agency Amra & Elma had developed a platform that ingested data from Instagram, and allowed its client to use AI image classifiers to find very specific influencers. For instance, they could find...
Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism

Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism

The substitutive effect In the future, machines will replace humans in jobs. This is not controversial: it’s what machines have done since well before the start of the industrial revolution. Petrol pump attendants were replaced by automated pumps, secretaries were replaced by Microsoft Office. This is what economists call the substitutive effect of automation: humans are substituted in jobs by machines. The complementary effect From time to time, fears have been expressed that humans would run out of jobs entirely. I first wrote about this concern back in 1980, and like many other people at the time, I under-estimated the...
The Impact of AI on Professional Services

The Impact of AI on Professional Services

Accountants and lawyers to use AI to cannibalise their business – before someone else does When you hear the word “automation...”, does your mind skip straight to “…destroys jobs”? If so, there should be a few stops in between. Automation is about removing friction, driving down costs, speeding processes up, and generally improving efficiency. Making goods and services better and cheaper is a good thing: it makes us all richer. There is scope to do this in all walks of life, and not least in professional services, such as accountancy and the law. Much of the work done by the...
Free: Review copies of “Pandora’s Oracle”

Free: Review copies of “Pandora’s Oracle”

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a novel called Pandora’s Brain. I’ve just finished the sequel, Pandora’s Oracle, and review copies are available – free, gratis, and for nothing. Let me know if you would like a copy – PDF, or a MOBI file for your Kindle. Pandora’s Brain was published in 2014. I wrote the first draft of a sequel the following year, but I wasn't happy with it, so it sat alone inside a computer, un-read and un-loved. I went on to write a series of non-fiction books about AI. I decided...
Book review: “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley

Book review: “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley

How Innovation Works A Review of “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley Innovation, according to Matt Ridley, “is the reason most people today live lives of prosperity and wisdom compared with their ancestors”. If this is true, then we should obviously all be keen to learn how to generate more of it. Matt Ridley is one the best non-fiction writers of his generation. He could be described as England’s Yuval Harari – minus the messianic vegetarianism, and the obsessions with religion and meditation. His latest book is a pleasure to read: he carries his considerable learning with an engagingly light...