Turns out it was a good thing that the best minds of our time worked on Ads
Getting people to click on ads may not have sounded like a great mission, but it aligned the incentives for the foundational research that gave us AI.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”
— Jeff Hammerbacher, co-founder of Cloudera and ex-Facebook engineer, in Bloomberg
When I first heard it a decade ago, I agreed with the sentiment. Today, maybe controversially, I’m thankful so much talent was assembled in the industry.
Why? Because I see all the advances in AI as downstream from that. Ads made Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” make economic sense. The push to improve ad performance incentivized companies like Google and Facebook to set up research labs like Brain and FAIR respectively, and the former to acquire Deepmind.
The foundations of AI are downstream of how ads align incentives for everyone - for publishers, for adtech companies, and yes for consumers too. They're the perfect example of people playing a positive sum game.
Of course, ads have been used against consumers' interests. They've been harnessed to encourage impulsive buying, reinforce unhealthy habits, or even manipulate political views and voting behavior (in all directions). Such issues deserve criticism. But knock the people who used the capabilities for bad, not the people who built the system for the positive effect it could have. A system that helped small businesses find more customers than ever before. To keep the open web alive when it could have so easily fractured into walled gardens.
Incentives design is incredibly important, and the ads model provided us with a system where further research and improvement always had huge payoffs. We should be thankful.