Human Dot AI: Joe Marchese on Who Your AI Agent Really Serves

“We gave AI a mission to make advertising revenue at all costs. It’s not evil. It just doesn’t care.” — Joe Marchese

INTRO

I’ve always been skeptical about the H word — “human”. Especially these days. In our AI age it’s lost its meaning. Today, it’s just another sloppy way of saying good. Being human equals not being a fascist. The word might have been invented by a bot.

So I was intrigued by today’s guest, who seems to be cornering the market in humanness. Former advertising executive Joe Marchese is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, wears a Human or Nothing hat, and has a new book entitled Human Dot AI. He got to the H word early, he confesses, naming his firm ten years ago, when humans were just human and machines were machines.

Marchese’s argument in Human Dot AI is less sentimental than his branding.

Nick Bostrom’s dystopian AI paperclip machine, he reminded me, wasn’t evil. We told it to make paperclips and it accomplished that mission. Similarly, over the last twenty-five years, in our Web 2.0 age of Google and Facebook, we’ve handed AI the mission of making advertising revenue at all costs. And it did exactly that with our news feeds, our recommended videos, our information diet.

“It’s not evil,” the former Fox advertising chief told me about AI. “It just doesn’t care.”

So now in our post-Web 2.0 age, he says, we are at another fork. Your AI agent is supposed to work for you. Which, in the real (i.e. legal) world, indicates fiduciary duty. What happens when that agent — or, at least, its human owner — is quietly taking a cut for every advertisement the AI serves us?

“Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan reminds us. So who will your agent serve?

FURTHER READING

•   Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business (Amplify), by Joe Marchese and Jonathan Bing.

•   “Reimagining advertising with AI,” OpenAI.

•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Noam Cohen on Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg film, Mustafa Suleyman on containing and controlling AI, Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism, and D. Graham Burnett on the war for your attention.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Joe Marchese is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, the New York venture firm he started with Heather Hartnett in 2015. He founded the attention-based advertising company true[X], which Fox acquired in 2014, and then served as president of advertising revenue at Fox Networks Group until 2019. He has sat on the board of Clear Channel Outdoor since 2019 and was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Achievement in 2016. Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business, written with Jonathan Bing, is published by Amplify. He lives in New York.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.