Disrupting Disruption

How Adobe Is Makng Me Feel

You hear a lot of idioms when you work in adech. Fail fast. Long tail thinking. And perhaps the most powerful, disrupt everything.

This call to innovate has led to the engine that is driving the U.S. economy. A small number of tech companies are the biggest reason why the stock market as a whole has performed so well in the past six months, and there's no end of folks who want to be just like them. And for the most part, this is a great and good thing, especially if you are a fan of getting the U.S. off fossil fuel use.

I've made a living from innovation for decades, and at my current gig, continue in this vein. So what I'm about to discuss isn't an easy thing to denigrate. But here goes.

There are no panaceas in life, and nothing that comes without consequences. Sustainable energy infrastructure has an impact on the environment, albeit one that's remarkably lower than fossil fuel use. I may delight in my phone taking pictures or serving as a flashlight or guitar tuner, but there are untold numbers of people who, thanks to these apps, no longer have employment. Consequences.

Which leads me to news from Adobe, demoed on stage and covered recently in business publications, of Voco. Basically, Photoshop for audio, which gives the operator of the software the ability to create thoroughly realistic scripts that were never said by the speaker. All you need is 20 to 40 minutes of data to work from, and you can make anyone say anything, in a fake that's nearly undetectable to anyone who isn't looking at the actual code.

No, seriously.

And while the stated use case for the software is clear and useful for a limited number of professionals -- sound engineers on media that get to skip laborious recovery sessions -- the far greater negative impact on humanity seems clear, yes?

If fake news is the scourge by which elections and social media has been more or less permanently corrupted, how much worse does it get when you add these tools to the mix?

If governance is becoming an ever-growing toxic mix of tribalism, what happens when you give by any means warriors these weapons?

And if we've gotten into this mess due to a corrupting narrative of how you can't trust the media or your government...

Well, what amount of damage kicks in when sight and hearing are also suspect?

There are some tools that, at the risk of infuriating extreme libertarians, are widely regarded as not suitable to be in the hands of private actors, due to the risk of misuse. Tanks. Lethal gases. Nuclear weapons. And so on.

If Adobe about to make the coding equivalent... well, let me put it this way.

We're going to have bigger problems then, say, consumers no longer thinking that a celebrity is really endorsing your goods or services...

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