17 Angelinvesting.it - From idea to Series A - Weekly Newsletter

The attention Act

3 Minutes to reflect

Have you ever been to Silicon Valley? In the summer of 2019, I was fortunate enough to be part of a mission organized by Club Degli Investitori, the angel investor club in my hometown, which took us to visit some of the most famous tech companies in the world.

We visited Apple, Salesforce, Airbnb, and many startups in the Valley, but the visit to Google left a lasting impression on me, though not a positive one.

I remember sitting on a chair inside the Google shop in the Google Campus, feeling sick to my stomach. It could have been the lousy American food, or perhaps it was the anger that the institution of Google was creating within me.

As I looked around, I saw some of the brightest minds in the world focused on one task: capturing our attention to turn it into money. It's called the attention economy. Our eyeballs translate into dollars, and that's their incentive.

I couldn't help but wonder, what if instead of selling advertisements, these brilliant minds were engaged in fighting cancer or global warming? Wouldn't that be a better use of their lives, and wouldn't it create more value for the world?

It's easy to dismiss this as the beauty of the market, but with AI advancing at an unprecedented pace, this topic is more relevant than ever, and we should be talking about it.

AI is already more intelligent than humans in many tasks, including powering apps like TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, Amazon, and others. They make extensive use of neural networks to keep us glued to our screens, and our distraction is their profit.

We can't pretend that it's solely up to individuals to have the willpower to moderate social media usage. It's time for regulators to step in and set serious rules to protect everyone, just like with alcohol, drugs, and tobacco. We still have time to act, and we should.

2 Resources to pro level

The guy behind the famous Netflix documentary “the social dilemma” discussing AI impact on us

A crazy story explaining how TikTok uses different algorithms in China compared to the rest of the world → https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/china-is-hurting-us-kids-with-tiktok-but-protecting-its-own/amp/

1 Reason to be happy

It took him 70 years, he finally got to product market fit

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Have a great weekend,

Simone

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