Why the current tech backlash feels different

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Why the current tech backlash feels different

Answering your Decoder questions about surveillance, AI coverage, and the Nilay rant.

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Nick Statt: Hello and welcome to Decoder, Nilay’s show about big ideas and other problems. This is Nick Statt, senior producer. And I’m joined by our brand-new supervising producer, Greg Ott.

Greg Ott: Good day, everyone. And Hi, Nilay. Nilay is here too. He is the person who hosts the show, and his name is also in the show. So it makes sense.

Nilay Patel: It’s true. We don’t consistently say my name in the show enough. We should do it all the time. I should do it. Welcome to Decoder with Nilay Patel.

GO: Like Nick was saying, this is Nilay’s show and we are doing a mailbag episode. This is where we go through all the feedback. Because you listen to the end of every episode, we know you do. We do mention that we go through every single email that we get. Nick, you can verify that. We get a ton of email, and we do read through all of it. Is that true?

NS: We now get YouTube comments. We get many, many Verge comments. We get Spotify comments and posts on Bluesky, Threads, and elsewhere. So yeah, we get a lot of feedback.

I do feel like promising we’ll read all the YouTube comments is an emotional commitment that we’re making, but we do read everything.

NS: I do read the Spotify comments. I read every one because those are specifically pretty pointed.

GO: Yeah. They’re kind of like uncut gems. Because they’re trying to build this little community, somebody might read this because it only gets like six comments as opposed to 600 for a YouTube video.

NS: We last did a mailbag episode in April, and we said we were going to do more of these. So we’re back again. This is September. We’ve had a few months. We’ve had a lot of really big interviews. So yeah, let’s just get into it.

GO: We’re going to kick things off with the “software brain” video you put out. This was one of the biggest things that people have commented on. It is far and away the most talked-about episode in the past six months. Hundreds of comments on The Verge website, hundreds of comments on YouTube, single to double-digit comments on Spotify, and lots and lots of emails.

We want to start there because a lot of the feedback was positive and people actually rarely email us a ton of negative feedback. We get a lot of, “Attaboy.” Some guy I knew in high school just emailed me — Hi Dean — saying how much he liked our Kathy Hochul episode. So people like the show, but for this one, we got some negative stuff on The Verge that we’re going to get to in a second.

One thing we wanted to talk about though is something a reader brought up about the idea of the Nilay rants. And of you effectively pulling out your inner Dennis Miller and really giving us your take on something. For this one, one listener wrote, “Just listened to ‘People do not yearn for automation,’ and all I can say is the people do yearn for more Nilay rants.”

So we want to know, what is the origin of this type of rant? And then how much of the show’s DNA do you think is built around this idea of you giving us the rant, and the idea of you giving us your hot take on something really, really well thought out, as opposed to the interviews we usually do?

I feel like I should make another riff on the “People do not yearn for automation,” but as Dennis Miller — just full rant.

GO: We’re going to have to pull out some really good old references.

The power of AI means Dennis Miller can deliver software right now.

GO: “Let me tell you something, babe. Sam Altman, the last time he was sitting in a Whataburger…”

Right. We could just do it. It’d be great. I’m sure we wouldn’t get sued for that.

They’re just essays. I know they’re rants and they’re delivered on YouTube and they’re very pointed in particular ways. But that’s just what I would’ve written as a column 10 years ago before we had podcasts this way. It has been very obvious to everyone that you can’t just write a column and expect to have an impact. You have to stare at the camera and do it. We’re very good at publishing that as a column and then having a transcript and polishing it and delivering it all the other ways.

That’s the origin of it: For all the podcasting I do and as little writing as I do anymore, in my heart, I’m still a writer. Taking all of the reporting and all of the ideas that we hear and all the conversations we have and synthesizing them into ideas that you can grapple with is the point. It is really the point of running a magazine.

That’s where that comes from. Now, can I do it as often as I want to do it? I obviously can’t. The reason I did “software brain” at that moment is that the excitement around AI is so high. The hype is so high and it’s all connected to how good AI systems are at writing software and manipulating databases. But the reason that I thought, “I got to make the time to do ‘software brain’ right now,” is that I could see the hype cycle around AI failing to contend with the lack of verifiability in every domain except software. That’s getting a little blurry now.

Lots of companies are just databases. Software engineering is verifiable, you can run it through the compiler and see if it works. AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. If you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good, it’s done. You can see the labs are talking about how they’ve achieved AGI or they will very soon and it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. I’m just not discounting that that’s important. I’m just saying once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder.

You can see it in the episode we did with Verge reporter Robert Hart about AI and math. There’s an amount of verifiability in math and you can burn a lot of tokens, we don’t know how many, and solve some unsolved math problems. There’s probably verifiability in various other science domains, so it’s really interesting. Is there verifiability in generating novel drugs? No, you got to inject a bunch of people with novel drugs. What are we going to do?

GO: That’s why they got so many rats in cages somewhere, it has to be done.

Right. There’s just some other thing that’s going to happen in the next 10 domains that is going to be really, really challenging. That’s where I wanted to put the marker down and say, “I have been swimming in this water for a long time with these people and the power of software is not to be denied, it has remade our world. But if that’s the only framework or you think that is a universal framework, you’re going to run into these walls.”

There are lots more of those we can do, but I want them to hit, I only want to write hit singles. Importantly, they’re all born of the reporting. That’s always been the dynamic on The Verge. Certainly the dynamic on Decoder is the data can get to your head.

The episodes where I just talk sometimes outperform the episodes with CEOs. That’s not good. That’s a bad incentive loop for me because I want everything to come out of the fact that I’ve talked to all of the people and you can go check my work. You can go see what those conversations are like and you can see that they are genuine and honest in all the things they should be.

That’s where I feel like I not only have the depth and the foundation to write something like “software brain,” but I can send it to those people and say, “This is how I feel about it.” They come on the show and they talk to me about Google Zero or “software brain” and all that stuff, and that conversation gets much bigger than me just ranting.

NS: My reaction to that, Nilay, is that you feel like your thesis for “software brain” has borne out over the last few mont