AI's Future Unveiled: An Interview With Robert Scoble

Welcome to this week’s Deep-fried Dive with Fry Guy! In these long-form articles, Fry Guy conducts an in-depth analysis of a cutting-edge AI development or developer. Today, our dive is about a tech legend, media pioneer, and AI influencer, Robert Scoble. We hope you enjoy!

*Notice: We do not gain any monetary compensation from the people and projects we feature in the Sunday Deep-fried Dives with Fry Guy. We explore these projects and developers solely for the purpose of revealing to you interesting and cutting-edge AI projects, developers, and uses.*

Robert Scoble has been a consistent voice in the tech industry for the past 25 years. An author and insider in Silicon Valley and one of the most influential tech bloggers of all time, Scoble continues to make his influence known.

Amidst the recent wave of AI development and integration, our FryAI team sat down with Scoble to get his thoughts on AI’s future.

HOW DID SCOBLE GET INTERESTED IN TECHNOLOGY?

When Robert Scoble was 13 years old, his mother got a job at Apple. While she was working there his mother had him help put together hundreds of Apple 2 motherboards. Scoble said, “This got me to fall in love with new things, and when I saw the guy who designed the motherboards in a parking lot at the community college I was attending, I started following him around … and that was Woz [Steve Wozniak], and that kicked off my whole career.”

Since then, Scoble has worked at Microsoft, Fast Company, RackSpace, and started one of the most successful tech blogs of all time.

Scoble started his successful tech blog while he was working for a computer program magazine. He spent a lot of time working with speakers and setting up conferences, and two of them talked him into blogging back in December of 2000. His blog, Scobleizer, was one of the first tech blogs on Google, and was the only tech blog for about half a decade to announce the launch of the latest in tech. New tech companies would itch for a chance to be featured on his blog, and he was also the first to feature a link to successful blogs like Techcrunch and others.

At Microsoft, Scoble learned a lot about the ins and outs of the tech business. He walked around with a video camera and did interviews with everyone from Bill Gates to the janitor, asking them a variety of questions about what they were doing on a daily basis. Over the course of his time there, he conducted over 600 interviews. Since then, he’s had a passion for exploring the latest in tech developments and companies.

WHAT DOES SCOBLE THINK ABOUT AI?

Scoble is full steam ahead on AI, embracing it at every turn. In his interview with FryAI, he acknowledged that this “magical technology” is growing at an exponential rate, leading to a lot of change for humanity.

Scoble is impressed with what he calls the “big, sexy” AI projects like ChatGPT-4 and DALL-E, but he also finds the emerging projects exciting. One AI feature Scoble finds fascinating is Rewind. It listens to conversations, watches your movements, and writes up notes and summaries of what’s being talked about, helping users improve their communication skills over time.

AI is not just changing how humans are interacting with the world, it is changing the world itself. As Scoble told FryAI, “We are headed into a world of augmented reality. In five years, you’re gonna be wearing a pair of glasses.” Apple, for example, is rolling out their version of an augmented reality headset next year, and as Scoble says, “This will be big and ugly and expensive, but in a few years it will be a much cheaper pair of glasses.” Scoble has seen the prototypes of such AI glasses and says that they are “insane.” He explained that the experience is so mind-blowing that when these types of glasses become available, everyone is going to find themselves at the store getting a pair. Scoble describes, “In that world, you will have an AI assistant or group of assistants that are in the room with you, like standing next to you or sitting next to you. You will talk to them, and they will talk back to you, and they will know all music, all art, all history, all science.” This sort of technology will also allow for the implementation of things like immersing oneself physically into surround sound music. As Scoble describes, “We might imagine a castle with 100 rooms, and each room can have its own separate music style” based on an easy vocal prompt. One might walk into one room and hear jazz, another room and hear rock n’ roll, etc.

One potential concern for the development of augmented reality is the loneliness factor and a lack of human connection that might stem from this newly imagined reality. Why would someone interact with a human friend when they could spend time with a friend which knows them better and can talk to them about a wider variety of things? As Scoble says, “You don’t know all things about music, but my AI buddy does!” This could lead to an interesting dynamic, but it seems to be coming whether we like it or not.

Scoble sees tremendous potential for AI to do just about everything in the future, but one current limitation he points out is its tendency to hallucinate—put more simply, it tends to make up stuff. For example, he said he tried to use the technology at a restaurant to give him recommendations. Four of the recommendations were good, but two were items that did not even exist on the menu—the AI confabulated them. The reason, Scoble says, is because “it doesn’t really know [these things]—it only knows how to pick the next token or word. But the technology is so amazing at doing that it fools you into thinking it knows how to write a college essay on a topic, for example, or what to eat at a restaurant.” Large language Models (LLMs) do many of these tasks very well, but these slight hallucinations or errors are something that we currently have to be cautious of in our usage and validate the facts. The content produced by LLMs also have an apparent pattern, which leaves out the human emotion, or as Scoble says, “the weirdness that we all bring to the table … you have to sprinkle that in there yourself.”

Scoble also notes—in classic Scoblizer fashion—that while AI has this incredible potential, it is also “scary as f**k. It watches you and listens to you, it comes after jobs, it could increase the wealth inequality problem … and there is this existential threat.” However, he believes “AI itself is going to help us figure out the solution to these threats.”

WHAT IS SCOBLE UP TO NEXT?

Scoble has been one of the most influential tech influencers on Twitter (now X) since its conception. In fact, he had the most followers on Twitter for the first two years of its life. Furthermore, there was even a unit developed in 2008 called the milli”scoble” which graded users’ Twitter activity in comparison to Robert Scoble’s. At that time, he was tweeting an average of 21.21 tweets/day, so a milliscoble (0.02121) was measured as 1/1000th of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble a way for people to measure the “cost” to their feed of following someone.

Scoble’s content is still kicking hard on Twitter (X) to this day, as he boasts almost half a million followers and continues to tweet diligently. His Twitter also currently displays a plethora of lists he has built, ranging from AI’s uses in industries such as healthcare and music to lists of venture capitalists who invest in AI. One of his more recent lists is his list of over 3,300 new companies doing all sorts of things in the AI space. As Scoble says, “That shows you something is going on.” As a result of these incredible findings, he has released a new show on X called Unaligned (featured by Elon Musk himself) where he explores behind-the-scenes of these AI companies.

Scoble is undoubtedly knowledgeable in the tech space, and his recent explorations in AI serve as an incredible resource to learn more about what is going on in the space. His enthusiasm for the future of AI is contagious, and it is this human fervor that continues to drive the technology forward.

WANT TO SEE THE FULL INTERVIEW?

Our FryAI team sat down for an interview with tech legend Robert Scoble. View the entire interview here: