This midlife crisis preceded AI, it’s sort of an inability to see the future. AI has made that more stark, but there still seems to be wide disagreement on the role of AI in any future.

I honestly felt google is dying a slow death before the recent Gemini models came out. Their search product was pretty reviled. They had very little innovation anywhere.

But after a comically bad start with Bard, they’ve been totally kicking ass with Gemini, and Waymo is become a submarine hit threatening Uber and Lyft. It’s to a point where I think those business will eclipse their cloud and workspace products. (maybe YouTube will become the next wasteland like the google search index, with AI video growing, I hope not though)

In fact, I’d be more worried about MS and Apple. MS started so strong and then stagnated, who even knows what they’re up to now?

Apple is moving at a glacial pace and has had a comically bad time with anything AI so far. “Apple Intelligence” is a joke. Tim Cook has been great at the long term investment stuff, except Siri has seen no meaningful improvements in a decade.

It’s just so early to tell who the winners and losers are going to be. This feels like the early years of iPhone/Android/Blackberry/Windows Mobile.

It's about relevance.There is an inevitability that is expliset in our technology and human nauture, which is that our devices become extensions of the idividual, rather than the desperate attempts to turn all human activity into asymetric relationships with corporations that we are fielding now.litteraly freedom VS feedom. Right now, big tech and government are doubling down on denying people the right to self selected peer to peer groups and contacts in an unsensored format that allows financial transactions and barter in the things they want and need. IE: everybody gets webspace, with a blog and store and can then connect through open groups of there choice. There is absolutly no reason for "platforms" to exist , they are hurting society ,undermining our productivity and offer no advantage in the tasks that we must accomplish to achive a long term sustainable civilisation. Big tech and government are attempting to build an AI powered system that will institutionalise everybody in there own lives, puppeted and controlled through there devices. Luckily this is impossible, but we have to live through the maddness of the attempt, which if you are a student of history and human behavior, is tedious.