Welcome back to the Mindplex Podcast and our new weekly live format!

This week’s show will feature co-hosts Ben Goertzel, Grace Robot and Lisa Rein in lively conversation with Doc Searls on personal AI, and the way our online experience is increasingly about taking charge of our data collection and use — securing our privacy, our experience, and creating an economy based around each consumer’s personal needs.

Live Mindplex Podcast with Doc Searls
Thursday, January 18th at 11 am PST/7 pm UTC

Episode 18’s Featured Guest, Doc Searls, on Personal AI

Our latest episode features none other than Doc Searls, one of the legends of the tech writing world!

Doc will help us decipher the difference between “Personal AI” that you control and “Corporate AI” that controls you; and what it means for the future of the internet, marketing, and how consumers will increasingly take charge of their end of the e-commerce relationship (with profound effects).

In a clip from last year’s DWeb Camp, Doc explains:

“We are not seats or eyeballs, or end users or consumers, we are human beings, and our reach exceeds your grasp — deal with it.

We were talking then among ourselves about what a profound and amazing and miraculous and unprecedented thing the internet itself was, when it was loosed upon the world, it made a state change in the world that we thought had enormous portent, not just for the companies of the world, and the governments of the world, but for the people of the world for each of us, as individual, sovereign and capable human beings.

And this is a shout-out to, you know, basically all the capitalists out there that “we’re trying to control this” will be, “we thought we’re going to try and control us.”

Doc Searls on the rise of “Surveillance Marketing”

Doc has long been describing the complexities of the system that we find ourselves up against and how it’s not just the surveillance system, but the entire way that businesses have started to work. For instance, when we used to talk about “advertising,” — up until like 1999 or so, we thought about what you saw around you. Billboards by the side of the road, and what was seen on TV.

“It was never aimed directly at us personally,” says Doc. “It made brands. It paid for journalism, it paid for a great many things, it was in some ways a grace of civilization, and not just a curse. But it was not something that was following us. And now it is.”

Doc sees new opportunities emerging for consumers to take back the power of data and marketing, and vendors are being forced to pay attention. Even such small and individual technologies as ad-blocking are heavily impacting big businesses, and the impacts are only growing as privacy-enabling technologies increase. These changes are forcing a new paradigm in corporations, and a market that is shifting to focus on catering to consumers as individuals.

A Deeper Dive into Doc Searls

Doc Searls co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, and David Weinberger. The book was a far-seeing best-seller that caused a sensation when it was published. The primary theme is that “markets are conversations” and that the Internet and its integral technologies (email, news groups, mailing lists, chat, and web pages) are unlike conventional media used in the mass marketing of the past, thus transforming traditional business practices.

More recently, Doc published: The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (2012). An evolving look at how control of personal data determines our future, the book describes a positive future where individuals can control the flow and use of their personal data, build their own loyalty programs, dictate their own terms of service, and be able to sway the market towards what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much they are willing to pay — without yielding their own privacy, and outside of any one system’s silo.

This was recommended as a ‘Must-read book’ by TechCrunch, and should be on the list of anyone looking to understand the current shift underway from the internet being ‘shopfronts’ to becoming the information commons.

About Episode 18’s Featured Guest: Doc Searls

Doc Searls is editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012), co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Basic Books, 2000), a fellow with the Center for Information Technology & Society at UC-Santa Barbara, co-founder of Customer Commons, and director of ProjectVRM, based at Harvard’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, where he is an alumnus fellow. He is also a pioneering blogger and a photographer whose photos accompany hundreds of Wikipedia articles.