Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of the PressPectives Podcast. I am your host Ruairi Doyle, and I am here to help us dive into topics at the intersection of technology and publishing together with some incredible guests. So whether you are an industry pro, a curious learner, or just looking for some inspiration, you are in the right place. Today's guest is none other than Esther Dyson. Esther is an author, a commentator, an accomplished investor, a philanthropist, and today one of the world's leading figures in digital technology and health. And full disclosure, Esther is also a director on the board of PressReader. Esther, you are very welcome to the podcast. Where in the world are you and what are you up to?
I'm at my wonderful home in New York City.
Well, it's great to be able to connect to you from Vancouver, Canada all the way to New York. So Esther, you have a fascinating background. Your father was a physicist, your mother a mathematician. I believe you had Nobel Prize winners over for dinner. I think we were sharing a car ride one day and you were telling me about how you watched Oppenheimer and it was so relatable to you, and I think you even grew up on campus at the Institute for Advanced Study. After that, you headed to Harvard and then you started your career as a reporter and fact checker. And after that, you've had numerous investments in different companies and organizations, and of course you're notably the founder of Wellville. But I want to go back to when you started your career as a reporter and a fact checker. I'm curious what originally led or motivated you to start off in that field.
Well, I wrote for my school actually when I was seven. I think I started the Dyson Gazette, which was on carbon paper, and it was about what George did in first grade and the new baby and this kind of stuff. There were probably six or seven issues of that. Then I worked for the high school paper, and then in college I joined the Harvard Crimson. I started out paid for proofreading, and then I wrote articles for free and I loved it. If I ever gave money to something, it would not be to Harvard itself but to the Crimson. And I also learned more working there than I ever did in my classes.
Yeah, in the field is often more practical than some of the theory that they teach.
Well, the problem is the classes are all about remembering stuff somebody already knows, and journalism is about finding or at least telling stories in a way that people didn't already know. So it was just fundamentally more interesting.
And if we go back to the Dyson Gazette, you called it right? What originally got you into that at seven years old?
I thought it would be cool and I liked writing, I liked reading. I thought we should have news. We had news in the family and it was just fun.
So Esther, I was born in 1980 and I just about snuck in on the tail end of Gen X. I'm one of the last generations to remember life without internet and mobile phones. When you were creating that publication at seven years old, it was very raw without all of these technological distractions, and even probably when you started your career it was without any of those things too. I'm curious, is there anything that you miss from those days when we didn't have all of this useful technology that we have today?
So I remember when I was working at Forbes, there was a library that was full of folders with companies' annual reports and news articles and so forth. There was no other way to find stuff. And if you wanted to talk to the company, you would find their phone number, you would ask for the PR department, then you would say 'I'm a reporter from Forbes, I'd like to set up an interview with your CEO.' So I was in my early 20s and I flew all around the country. I went down to Dallas to interview the CEO of American Airlines. I went to Wyoming to visit the coal mines. It was just amazing.
What do you think the benefits of technology have been over the years in helping journalists do their work?
Well, it is so much easier to find stuff out. And of course it's so much easier for your competition to find it out as well. You can get in touch with people much more easily, you can store your notes, and now you can have ChatGPT help you at least write a first draft of whatever it is you want. It's easier to find. You still need to have the journalistic smarts to know what makes sense, to ask the questions that aren't being asked, to find the story that people haven't already seen or understood or found out. Of course, people's attention spans are much shorter, which is very sad. If you want to go to the media business, there's a lot of destruction and maybe a little bit of creative destruction.
In terms of destruction or transformation, the elephant in the room today, a rather large one for the publishing industry and the industry that we're in and PressReader, is AI. It's a new wave of industrial revolution or evolution or whatever you want to call it. It's got all types of opportunities, challenges, threats for publishing and moreover for society at large. I'm a father to a one-year-old and a three-year-old, and some days I'm very excited, other days I am terrified. And you're no stranger to this area. You've been commenting on it, and it's changing daily. I'm just wondering what's top of mind for you with regard to AI and publishing, or just AI in general.
The real news is the news that people won't tell you. AI is great for looking at all the press releases and finding out who's got new products and so forth. But in the end, the stories that people want to know, to be real, it is usually bad news where you need journalists to go out and find what really happened, who was responsible, how come they couldn't handle this better. The reality is the journalist needs to find out the stuff that they don't put in the press releases. Once a journalist finds it, then AI can copy it and reuse it and so forth. But the journalists who get people to tell the truth, that's still a very human endeavor. It requires knowing other humans, and it requires journalists to do it in different ways, but fundamentally it requires treating people with respect and giving them the dignity and asking them to tell their story in their way, and then understanding, 'Oh well, I got three different versions of this story, which one is most accurate?' Again, the journalist has to have the wisdom to look at all the facts and all the motivations and come up with a coherent story. We talk about unexplainable AI, but in the real world the real problem is unexplainable humans, including the humans behind the businesses that use AI to implement whatever their business model might be. Again, I'm not so much scared of the AI, but I'm scared of the business models that are using AI to make us spend money on things we don't need, make kids feel inadequate so they go buy stuff they don't need.
On that theme, there's a role for governments and regulation to perhaps chart a course through it. I think it's fair to say that the US Congress, the European Union, and other big government bodies all over the world are still playing catch-up to Big Tech, still playing catch-up to social media and its impact on society and young people in general. Do you think any lessons have been learned in the last 10 to 15 years that are preparing governments for what's about to happen, which we all understand is going to be in some way positively or negatively transformative? Do you think any lessons have been learned or are they ready?
I certainly want government regulation and I want government enforcing the laws, but I'm not sure. I'd much rather have a strong legal liability environment because I'm not sure government can act fast enough to fix things. If you make the businesses or the individuals who cause the damage liable for that damage, then you don't need to define in advance how it was created. AI is very complicated, and so I'd rather look at the damage. Insurance works in two ways: one is it compensates people, but more importantly an insurer can go into a company and say, 'We don't like what you're doing, we think this is going to lead to damage.' They don't need to have a law written, they can simply say, 'We're not going to insure you.' Insurance was a huge factor in reducing fires in the early 19th century because they would go in and do fire inspections. It wasn't because there was a law, but because you couldn't get fire insurance, and if you didn't have fire insurance you couldn't get this or that permit to do something else. I think some notion of liability versus defining what is correct is a much better way to keep up with the ever-changing, fast-changing things that AI is capable of.
I agree and I want to believe that that is possible. However, I was just this week listening to The Daily podcast from The New York Times, and it was about a lawyer who has been working with the parents of Sandy Hook and another school shooting since that. He was highlighting that there's something called PLCAA related to gun law in the US that's essentially a get-out-of-jail card for gun manufacturers, and then there's another law regarding big tech that they cannot be liable for.
