You Ask, I Answer: Predictions for the Future of Content Marketing?

In today's episode, Brian asks: Any predictions on what might happen with content marketing in the next 10 years? No. Nope. Can't predict that. No idea.

Absolutely no idea. And here's why. In the last four years, natural language generation, the ability for machines to write, to create content, has leaped from crap to mediocre, which is a huge leap. It's a big, big move. Until about 2018, machines could barely put words together.

And they didn't make sense. And you know, they were really just useless. And then around 2018, we started getting these transformer-based models, BERT and BART and GPT and so on and so on and so forth. That because of their technology, the way they use embeddings and stuff, they're able to put together much more coherent language and create content that's mediocre. They can write press releases.

Like nobody's business. I've been saying for years, nobody reads their child press releases before bedtime. Right? Nobody. That's just four years.

We had a quantum leap. Well, I should say a big leap because it's not technically quantum computing. We've had a big leap in four years. What's gonna happen in the next ten, who knows? Because we're already seeing some amazing leaps ahead in a lot of these much bigger transformer models and how we use them, how we distill them down, how we do hyperparameter tuning on them.

We have the huge question mark in technology of quantum computing. Quantum computing is a type of computing using the principles of quantum physics that much more closely mimics how the human brain works, right? Our brains are really amazing. They are these massive networks of relatively slow processors, right? That are just meshed together in this huge network.

And the processors are analog. They're not zeros and ones, they're a grade, you know, every zero and one, everything in between. And there are certain thresholds after which a processor will output something. That's how nerves work. You're the nerve cells in your brain.

Quantum computing is starting to be able to do the same thing. Right now we've got a computer that is stable at about 100 qubits, which would be like a human brain with a hundred cells. But as the technology improves, as we can stabilize it, we can deal with the temperature issues. Expect to see you know 200 qubits, 500 qubits, and then at a certain point, these machines, which by the way, operate at the speed of light, and our brains operate far below that, um, will be able to do the kind of fuzzy thinking that the human brain is really good at. That could happen in the next 10 years, right?

And if that does, that will radically change all forms of computing because machines will then be able to think in non-binary terms. They will be able to make decisions that have shades of gray as opposed to just yes or no, zero or one. And that would change content marketing forever. Because at that point, a machine could be able to start understanding what it's creating. If you look at the natural language processing models that exist today, they no matter how complex they are, no matter how good the content they seem to create are, they have no actual understanding.

The machine does not understand what it's saying. If you type in the sentence, five plus four equals, right? Or 22 plus 19 equals. None of these machines will write whatever the mathematical answers because they are not reading the text. They're not understanding what they're saying.

But when if you were to introduce that kind of fuzzy thinking, that becomes possible for them to start to create cognition within machinery. And that's at the point where you can start getting things like artificial general intelligence, machines with sentience with sapiens. And then we have to have some very existential conscious conversations about humanity in general. But that's that's still a ways off. But within the next 10 years, who knows?

Can look at technology itself and say that the amount of information being generated continues to increase exponentially. That is true, is verifiable. The devices that we use to create content are getting better, faster, and cheaper every single day. Our ability to create immersive content used to be in uh extremely expensive. Now you can buy a 360-degree camera off of Amazon for like $500 and have it create good results that you can use in a virtual reality headset.

So there's no way to know what's going to happen in 10 years, even five years. We just don't know. But what we do know is what's not going to change. We know people will always want things better, faster, and cheaper, right? Get more, pay less.

People will always want that. People will always want to be educated, to be entertained, to be engaged emotionally in the content they consume. Those things are not changing. And if we focus on fulfilling those needs, right, we will do well. Consumers and content consumers have embraced mobility, right?

This sort of thing, not as much because this is ugly, heavy, and looks stupid. This is everywhere. Mobility first is unlikely to change. The form factors may change, how the devices function may change, but the idea of having the world's publicly available knowledge in your pocket, not going to change in that anytime soon, right? The idea of frictionless interactions.

Or groceries appear, or a date appears, right? These things are part and parcel of this frictionless world, and that expectation of the frictionless transaction is not going away. Consumers want things to be easier and easier. And B2B, B2C doesn't matter. We all want these things.

And we are all getting these things in some degree from this device, which means that this is the bar we have to live up to. And we've all become accustomed to thinking less. And those recommendations, we like them. We like them a lot. We still ask our friends and listen and there's still a place for serendipity, but we have to think a whole lot less than we used to 10 years ago.

Find me some new music. Nope. Spotify will spit up. Here's eight new tracks that you might like, right? What should I watch net next?

Netflix will tell you, or YouTube will tell you. What should I buy next? Amazon's more than happy to tell you what to buy next. And if our content marketing is aligned with these trends, then no matter what happens with it, we will be relevant. It's only when we get away from the things that people never change on that we run into trouble.

So that's my non predictions for the next 10 years.