We Get Kodak'd

I saw a video the other day from More Perfect Union. Driverless trucks, big rigs, running down Highway 45 in Texas with nobody in the cab. I'll be honest, I didn't even watch the whole thing. I didn't have to. It made me think as I do these days, more thinking than usual, and then it gave me a feeling I wasn't expecting.

Not wonder. Annoyance.

Which is surprising, because I'm a techie. Always have been. I'm the kid who watched Star Trek and dreamed about talking to a computer and having it just do the thing. I use AI every day now to help me work. I want the future. Most of the time when people go doom and gloom about where all this is heading, I beg to differ.

And maybe that's my blind spot. Maybe I'm exactly the guy this should worry you about, the one who embraces every shiny new thing on sight and goes all-in on the future right up until it's his own livelihood sitting in the empty lot. I know that about myself. So when a piece of shiny new future actually annoyed me, I paid attention, because that doesn't happen often.

Those trucks didn't make me feel the future. They made me think about Kodak.

You might not know that Kodak invented the digital camera. Nineteen seventy-five. One of their own engineers built it. And Kodak, sitting on top of the whole film business, looked at the future it was holding in its hands and buried it, because digital threatened the money they were already making. They didn't miss it. I keep thinking it came down to greed and the old thinking of if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

We all know how that ended. Digital came anyway. Tech always does. And the company that invented the digital camera collapsed. But the part that gets me, as a guy who's had a camera in his hands his whole life and watched that whole transition happen, is who actually paid. It wasn't the executives. It was Rochester. Twenty-thousand-plus workers. A whole city built around one company, hollowed out, because the people at the top couldn't see past their own balance sheet.

That's what the trucks are. That's what the annoyance was.

Because the technology is never really the villain. Driverless trucks aren't evil, and neither is AI, and neither was the digital camera. The damage comes from who catches the money when productivity goes up, and who's left holding the loss when the jobs go away. The gains float to the top, to whoever owns the fleet. The cost lands on the driver, and the truck stop, and the diner off the highway that fed him for twenty years.

And the pattern underneath it is the thing that just plain sucks.

The big players, oil, the airlines, the automakers, they all do exactly what Kodak did. They optimize for what's in front of them, the current business, the next quarter, the thing making them money today. They get so locked onto that one thing that they can't see anything beyond it. They're not stupid. They're just not looking up. And every time they refuse to look up, it's regular people who eat the cost of the change when it comes anyway.

I've been tossing this around in my head for way too long. A while back I wrote about a different version of the future, a way all these same industries, the oil companies, the airlines, the carmakers, could build the next thing instead of clinging to the last one, and come out ahead for doing it. I called it One Ticket. Then I wrote a second, longer piece about how you'd actually get self-interested giants to move, because they won't do it out of virtue. They'll only do it if you build the incentives so that seeing the bigger picture is also the profitable thing to do.

That's the whole point of those papers. The future is coming whether the incumbents look up or not. The only real question, the one nobody in charge seems to be asking, is who we decide should carry the cost of getting there. Right now the answer is the same as it was in Rochester. It's us.

So maybe I am the naive one, the guy who loves all of it and gets caught with his pants down. But I don't think loving the future and worrying about who it runs over are opposites. I think that's the only honest way to stand here. I want the trucks, and the world they're pointing at. I just don't want us to get Kodak'd on the way there, cheering the whole time, while the people at the top do what they always do, and refuse to look up until the rest of us are the ones left standing in the empty lot.

If you want the fuller picture, I laid it out in two pieces: [One Ticket], the vision, and [One Ticket, Part Two], the harder question of how you actually get it built.