Here is the English translation:
The biggest minefield in AI marketing currently.
Microsoft also advertised during the Olympics, and it was also for an AI product. Microsoft highlighted how Copilot assists users in their daily lives.
From streamlining schedules to making plans, Copilot ultimately helped users achieve the effect of "You empowered", which is a completely different tone from Google.
Even Apple, which was compared to Google's blunder, didn't repeat the same mistake this time. It was still an ad for iPad, but used more relatable street billboards and collaborated with a French illustrator, taking a lively and cute approach.
Apple has a "record". In May this year, when making an ad called "Crush" for the new iPad, a giant hydraulic press crushed pianos, paints, game consoles, and also crushed the audience's glasses, triggering a huge wave of criticism.
Despite Apple's precedent, Google didn't notice there was something wrong with its own ad, perhaps because it was facing several issues at the same time, or maybe because it didn't think it had done anything wrong at all.
01 A Beacon of Hope
Google hasn't been doing well lately.
On August 5th, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Google illegally monopolized the online search market, violating U.S. antitrust laws. On that day, Google's parent company Alphabet's stock price fell in response, dropping over 5%.
This is the biggest tech antitrust case since the antitrust battle between the U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft at the beginning of this century. It's also another antitrust fine for Google this year - in March, French regulators issued a fine of 220 million euros.
The U.S. Department of Justice's lawsuit states: "Twenty years ago, as the internet was just emerging, Google went from a scrappy startup to Silicon Valley's darling, thanks to its innovative search method. The Google of the past is long gone. Today's Google is just a gatekeeper of internet monopoly."
These few lines encapsulate the rise and fall of a tech giant over twenty-six years, as well as the changing attitudes of the world towards technological revolutions.
Going back to the first decade of this century, Google was the representative of openness and innovation in the last wave of the internet. Friends with some internet experience may remember the nickname "Guren Xi", which was coined by Google fans, meaning Google is humanity's beacon of hope.
The world's love for Google reached its peak in 2012. That year, Google Glass was released. On stage, Sergey Brin led the entire audience through Google Glass, transporting them to the perspective of skydivers high in the air.
They descended from the San Francisco sky, landing on the roof of the convention center where the launch event was held; then climbed and traversed the exterior of the building, finally with a mountain biker riding into the venue, rushing onto the stage, completing the debut of this product.
It was a highlight in tech history. When we look back at those video recordings today, the images are shaky and the pixels are lacking, but we can still glimpse the excitement and cheers everyone offered when new technology "landed" in the previous decade.
That year, it had been thirteen years since Google insisted on the motto "Don't be evil". However, it was only three years away from its reorganization into Alphabet. After the company's reorganization in 2015, this motto was rewritten; after 2018, it gradually faded away.
Alphabet's reorganization at that time certainly had many business considerations, but at the time, American companies were generally consolidating and expanding themselves, with this vision behind it: Maximizing profits and shareholder interests, letting society complete welfare distribution on its own, is precisely a manifestation of pursuing public interests.
However, this vision was not realized. Reorganization and expansion ultimately only led to monopoly, moving in a completely different direction from the early Silicon Valley hacker culture. Google went from "Don't be evil" to "Don't be human" now.
Moreover, the iteration of technology may be faster than tech people themselves estimated. Whether it's Google Glass or the search that Google has always relied on, they were once seen as more natural and harmless "progress" paradigms in the eyes of users.
Search engines, as keys to the world of information, provide retrieval services; mobile electronic devices like phones and glasses are ways for the digital world and offline life to interact with each other - they are all just aids to make life better, never about "replacing" humans.
However, artificial intelligence is different.
Artificial intelligence pursues automation. Whether through algorithms or machine equipment, it aims at work that is carried out in predictable environments in prescribed ways. AI products based on large language models further expand this definition, lowering the threshold of "predictability" and once again raising the level of automation.
Tech elites are generally fanatical about automation. However, working people view automation with a completely different perspective.
02 Even Automation Has Basic Laws
When it comes to automation, the Luddite movement of the early 19th century is often paraded out.
This movement against automatic looms was eventually forcefully suppressed by the British government. In the end, the opponents who smashed machines failed to stop the process of industrial automation.
This example is often used as an argument to demonstrate that the wheels of technological progress roll on unstoppably. But honestly, the economic form of the 19th century is too far removed from today.
In the modern economy, the proportion of service industries and knowledge work is far greater than in the industrial era. The impact and influence of AI on these fields is completely different from the impact on manufacturing in the Luddite era. It not only affects blue-collar workers, but may also affect white-collar jobs, including professional and managerial positions. It may also intervene in people's consciousness through natural language - these did not exist at all during the Luddite movement.
Has automation replaced humans in modern times? It has indeed happened.
In the 1920s, making a phone call required connecting lines, which was all done manually, mostly by young women. AT&T in the United States was the largest employer of telephone operators at the time.