A SpotifAI Model?

My friend Patrick Prill continues to dissect the growth, use, and risks of AI in our industry at the rate of an article or two a day, each one teasing out a particular thread from the very tangled issue ball. (Here's yesterday's.) I recommend reading them for a thoughtful and detailed analysis and reflection on today's software and social ecosystems and the ways that AI is reshaping them.

They certainly make me think and, as with last week's Hedging Your Bets on AI, I find it helpful to capture those thoughts as analogies, so here's another.

A very long time ago I wrote a music fanzine: A5, photocopied, 50p or a quid, sold by a scruffy long-hair in a German army jacket out of a battered record bag in the back rooms of pubs between bands. I remember well when domestic studio and CD-R technology became affordable because the volume of submissions for review increased dramatically ... and the overall quality likewise decreased.

The technology liberated the artist to create. Before then only really, really, really committed bands recorded their music at a half-decent fidelity and distributed it on a physical medium. Afterwards, some extraordinarily creative music was available that otherwise would not have been, but also any fool could put out anything ... and I should know because I bought a CD writer and puked my amateur efforts into the world too.

Our generation of software developers is living through the same kind of revolution in tooling. AI removes the technical friction that gatekeeps product creation: the build infrastructure, the product architecting, the test harnesses, the programming language fluency, and all the rest. What used to take senior-level developer skills no longer does. Throughput and output has increased dramatically ... and the overall quality has likewise decreased. The technology liberated the creativity of the artist, but also the fools.

Hot on the heels of the CD-R revolution came music streaming. Again, this disrupted the music industry by going around gatekeepers but this time it was the content filters that lost: the record labels, the distributors, radio and the music press. Streaming commoditised the artist. Music, at least at the business end, was always about the business, about the product, but services like Spotify make this absolutely clear with the microcent value they attach to each play.

But wait, our generation of software developers are also filters, authorities on, and gatekeepers for, the ideas that see the light of day. Their deep product and technology expertise, their ability to operate tools in a goal-driven, balanced, and ethical way, and their ability to look forwards and backwards from today in local and global contexts are all valuable checks on what gets built, how, and importantly why.

Sadly the same AI tooling that frees the creator kicks all of that filtering to the curb and replaces it with a black-box always-on suggestion-ready engine with a subscription model. The developer-as-artist loves the tech because of the creative potential. The developer-as-authority should be terrified of it because it discounts that creativity: when x is worth next to nothing, being a 10x engineer adds ... next to nothing.

--00--

The Spotify Model used to be shorthand for autonomising development teams. If we're not careful it will soon be shorthand for automating them, and the irony is that that so many developers will be smiling and waving it as it happens.
Image:Alexander Ugolkov on Unsplash

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