YouTube video

How Will AI Affect WordPress Freelancers and Agencies In The Next 18 Months

Explore the impact of AI on WordPress freelancers and agencies over the next 18 months. Learn how to adapt and thrive in a changing landscape.

In this insightful video, we delve into the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on WordPress freelancers and agencies over the next 18 months. Discover how AI tools reshape workflows, enhance client interactions, and redefine project management. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or a newcomer, understanding these changes is crucial for staying competitive. 

This Week’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Convesio: Convesio

Omnisend: Omnisend

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:02.100] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. In this show, it’s going to be an internal discussion between me and Kurt. We’re going to be talking about how AI is affecting WordPress and the WordPress freelancer and agency right now, and how it might affect freelancers and agencies in the next 18 months. Additionally, we will have a general discussion in the second half about AI. But I’m going to introduce my ever-patient co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

 

[00:00:56.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan. My name is Kurt von Ahnen. I own a company called God, MananaNoMas. We’re based in Kansas, and our focus is mainly on membership and learning websites.

 

[00:01:06.250] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I thought this would be a great subject, folks, because there’s been a lot of discussion about this recently. Additionally, a new article was written by a friend of the show, Mac Madaias. He wrote an article recently called What Does AI Site Builders Mean for Freelancers. It triggered some thoughts in my mind, and also in Kirk, so it should be a great show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this podcast, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we’ve some great special offers from our major sponsors, as well as a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services that we use daily at WP Tonic. It will save you a ton of time, as you won’t have to spend hours searching the internet for the right plugin or service to run your business. To get all these free goodies, all you have to do is go over to WP-Tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you’ll find all the goodies there, all the free goodies, my beloved WordPress professionals. What more could you ask for, I say?

 

[00:02:39.830] – Jonathan Denwood

Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page, my beloveds. So let’s go straight into it, my lovelies, my tribe, whatever. So let’s go into it. I think WordPress.com has made a public website builder available on some of the other shows and podcasts I do, which you help me with, Kirk. We’ve reviewed some AI platforms. I’m all over the place on this subject because I think the landscape is changing and will continue to change. But there’s also a part of me that winces at the propaganda and mind-numbing nonsense that’s also been talked about. So I’m all over the place. So, firstly, are you in a similar situation? And what are some of the things that you would like to point out initially in the start of this conversation, Kurt?

 

[00:04:06.540] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think the thing I want to point out first and foremost, initially, as your question, is that I’m nothing but a hypocrite on the subject. I’ve got multiple AI subscriptions myself. I use AI, although not extensively, but I do use it frequently. And so some of my opinions sound like I am anti-artificial intelligence. I am not anti-artificial intelligence. What I am against is a gross misuse or assumption about the tool, and that’s where I think my line is drawn. But to your point, it ebbs and flows. That line is completely drawn in the dirt or sand because the landscape is constantly changing around the subject.

 

[00:05:00.200] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think as a tool base, a set of tools that enable you to do more and more quickly for less effort, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, I think we need to be honest about WordPress’s history, and by understanding its history, we can then put the current situation into a more realistic context. We’ve got to be honest here, what drove WordPress to the stage where it’s running between 43 or 45% of all websites on the internet? Well, the main driver was that it could enable people utilizing plugins and themes to get a good quality website up and running that they would never be able to afford if they were approaching a individual freelancer or agency and building a bestoke custom website, building a CRM’s custom one, or creating a website hand-coded. They couldn’t afford it. Only the top echelon of business or individuals could afford it. And some of the other solutions, like Joomla and Drupal, which are still going, still have their place. They were highly technical for the average user. WordPress had an interface that an average marketer or businessperson, given the task of running the company’s website on a day-to-day basis, stood a chance of actually being effective.

 

[00:07:08.340] – Jonathan Denwood

But its origins were to offer value and the possibility of doing something that, before WordPress came on the scene, was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to achieve. So it’s always been a cost-saving platform to some extent. That is the origin of its initial success. And I see, obviously, Squarespace, Wix, and half a dozen other platforms, general website-building platforms. Shopify, I classify as one of them, with a niche around e-commerce. But they are doing the same. They’re offering a solution at a price level that 80% of individuals and businesses couldn’t afford a fully bespoke solution. What’s your reaction to just outlining?

 

[00:08:18.650] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s like everything else. I remember when a friend of mine brought home a 35, 3600 dollar, 36-inch TV It weighed 80 pounds. It was called a plasma TV, and we had to get a special bracket to hang it on the wall. And I thought, Man, you got to be a really tech nerd to want to go this route. My TV had a giant box behind it. Now, if my kids saw that old TV, they’d say, Why is there a box behind the TV, dad? Now I can go to Walmart, I can buy a 55 or a 65-inch TV for 300 bucks, and it weighs 30 pounds, and it slides right up. So over time, we see the progression of products. We see the progression of items that become more technical and easier. And the hope is that we all progress along this path. But if this conversation is about AI and how AI is having an influence on WordPress and how it’s progressed, I think it’s like when you say that the full site editing is a bridge too far, it’s almost like putting all these AI tools into WordPress and trying to the general public that now they can think of something and it happens.

 

[00:09:34.980] – Kurt von Ahnen

That’s just not real.

 

[00:09:36.870] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s not-That’s a lie, isn’t it?

 

[00:09:42.860] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan, I did my own podcast this morning on AI fatigue versus AI ignorance, which is worse. Think about people that watch the news that know everything in politics, and then think about people that say, I haven’t watched mainstream news in four years, and I feel great. It’s like there’s a certain freedom that comes from not given a crud and being disconnected.

 

[00:10:08.200] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I disagree with you slightly. I haven’t watched main broadcast medias about politics for eight years. I don’t watch American television. I don’t watch television, but I keep myself up because I consider most American television on whatever channel you watch. I consider it’s just propaganda in one form or another, where I come from England and the traditional media have a statutory duty to offer both sides of the issue, which was the case in America, But that particular requirement was legally removed. I think American mass media has gone down the shit hole in the past 20 years. It’s just gone down and it’s getting worse, not getting better.

 

[00:11:21.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

To use your language, I would say, in broad terms, a lot of this AI talk has gone down that shithole.

 

[00:11:30.920] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it has.

 

[00:11:32.240] – Kurt von Ahnen

There is, we got a tool for this and a tool for that. And you don’t need a webinar platform anymore. You don’t need a, this is the end of YouTube. No, it’s not. None of that is true. And there’s a certain amount where I think as a WordPress freelancer or an agency, I have some policies in place, and I’d like to encourage others to give it some thought. If someone approaches you and says, Hey, I was talking to ChatGPT, and it gave me this custom CSS code to remove all these items that I want removed from my website. I just don’t know where that goes. All you got to do is plug it in and hit save, and it should be fine. See, people are misidentifying AI sourced information, A, as being real, and then B, being easy, and C, being cheap. So then they don’t want to pay the freelancer or the agency to do the custom CSS work because they think they already did it. When you put that snippet in or you put that code into the CSS manager and nothing happens on the website or you get a big white screen that says critical error, now that customer that didn’t want to pay you to develop the code in the first place wants to hold you responsible for the outcome.

 

[00:12:50.080] – Kurt von Ahnen

And so I think we have to be very, very cautious how we talk to people, how we quote jobs, how we explain what’s getting done, why you’re the in the room. I used to work in the car industry, Jonathan, and when I was in sales, a sales manager once told me, he said, Don’t let the customer frustrate you when they come in and they think they’re an expert on buying a car. He’s like, No matter how long you’ve been a salesperson, you do this every day of your life. You are a professional. You have the confidence of the experience of doing this every day, time and service. They buy a car once every five years. You sell a car every single day. I feel that way AI. People come to me with these codes and these snippets and these weird questions or favors or asks, and I have to say, Hey, that’s great that you were able to do the based on that.

 

[00:13:41.120] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s been increasing, hasn’t it, in When you are working for your own as a freelancer, and when you work for WP, Tony, it’s increasing the amount of clients or possible clients that are approaching us. With this outline or this attitude, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re already discussing how we will cope with it, where are the boundaries, because also, as anybody that has done coding, a lot of coding is mind-numbingly monotonous. And having a modern development interface that can finish off code, strings, or functions, offer options, basically what AI is doing is just doing it on a higher level. Because a lot So a lot of coding is very boring, basically. And as the code base increases on a project, the ability to not have bugs introduced or typos in the code and that, it becomes a nightmare. If these AI tools can improve the situation, I think it’s fantastic. There have been some people that I follow on Twitter that said and these are reasonably experienced WordPress entrepreneurs and plugin developers. They’ve said that AI has really helped them in their new build-outs, blah, I’m sure it has. It’s definitely a position where I can see it being a real benefit to developers.

 

[00:16:09.480] – Jonathan Denwood

But on the other hand, there have been people in the community, not specifically WordPress, but in the general development community that have been saying some outrageous statements. I mean, absolute dribble of the highest order that you won’t have to have any prior knowledge, any insight or experience. It’s just utter It’s a whole shit, isn’t it?

 

[00:16:47.940] – Kurt von Ahnen

You had mentioned AI to make things faster for coders. Jonathan, that is no different than AI speeding up the process for a writer or an editor. The writer They know the topic, they know the subject, the editor knows grammar, and they might use some AI tools to hasten the experience, but they still overlook, oversee, and are responsible. That’s where I go back to responsible and accountable for the end product, for what’s released. And so as an agency myself, when someone brings me some self-developed code that they vibe coded in their basement, the first thought I have is, well, who’s responsible for this after I put it on your website? Am I responsible for putting it on your website because I’m the agency that installed it, or are you responsible because you built it and gave it to me? And that’s a big question mark for me. I’m real hesitant to walk down that pathway What do you do with those people.

 

[00:17:47.580] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, like I say, they are being promoted or they are listening to what I call utter propaganda, utter rubbish, that is coming from a certain group of people in the WordPress and in the general web design development area that are pushing this narrative. And like I said, I’m going to repeat my skip. In my opinion, it’s utter nonsense. But I think it’s also, I think for understandable reasons, Especially if you are in this area, it just change constantly, and you’re always on your nerves, and that you are going to be out of date. Your skill base is declining, and so you will not be able to make a decent income. And to some extent, you’re right to have that feeling. But in other ways, the fundamentals of good design, good UX design, actually having a website that actually achieves something. These have been problems and consistencies that have been here since the 20 plus years of the internet. I actively started messing around with it about ’96. I think in America, it started to get some traction of academia around ’83, ’84. I started messing around with it around ’96. I decided to do a degree as a mature student full-time, even though I was running a very successful business because I wanted a degree and I thought it was the right thing to do.

 

[00:19:52.140] – Jonathan Denwood

Actually, it was ridiculous. I actually knew more than my actual lecturers. But I still don’t regret it. But I’ve listened to all this and I’ve seen this all before, but this time it really is on steroids, isn’t it, Kurt?

 

[00:20:17.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I can’t really blame people. We’re just in an age where everybody wants the results without doing the work. People want to be able to build what I can build without 20 years of experience and that I’ve got in the field. It’s just that simple. They have been told that they can bypass the experience and push the easy button. That is a very attractive thing to hear. I mean, it’s no different than people that have been trying to lose weight for 30 years, and all of a sudden, they hear about Ozempic, and they’re like, Man, my doctor’s got to get me that. It’s the easy button to lose weight. Well, it turns out there’s a lot of other things on the other side of that It’s a decision that you have to look at.

 

[00:21:01.840] – Jonathan Denwood

Can I just slightly interrupt there? Sure. Because you’ve just made a fantastic point there. This whole thing about this… What was the name of the drug again?

 

[00:21:11.820] – Kurt von Ahnen

Ozempic, right? Ozempic, the way it’s called. Or whatever they call it. You take a shot and lose weight?

 

[00:21:18.650] – Jonathan Denwood

You’re so insightful because it has got some… Obviously, very different, but it has some similarity. To promote I’m not a drug to lose weight when you can reduce your intake of calories and increase your exercise regime, but the idea that you could use a drug, I’m not against using a drug when you’re seriously obese and you have got a level of obesity, that your health, that you have stage 2 diabetes and you are having to take heart drugs and other because of your obesity. Obviously, taking a drug to rapidly reduce your weight, I’m not against it, but to use it as a lifestyle drug. And all drugs have short, medium, and long term side effects. I see that as totally shows you how morally bankrupt the medical industry is in this country.

 

[00:22:37.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. When my obesity takes control, Jonathan, I quit drinking beer and I ride my mountain bike. It’s amazing how quickly things start to fall into alignment. And it’s the same with these AI tools. If you don’t have the knowledge and the experience and you can’t do the hard work behind it, you’re asking for trouble. You might get quick results, but you’re not going to get long-standing success. Imran’s all over the comments. He’s a friend of the show, and he’s super brilliant in the field. But he’s saying it’s a lot of the echo chamber for us, right? Knowledge is needed, especially being able to interrogate and check the code. That’s so important. I read an article from a TLDR email just last week. It was written by a guy from San Francisco. He’s a security expert, Dan Goodin. And I did some research on Dan, and Dan Goodin and seems to have the criteria to be an expert. And they did a test with different AI tools. They did 576,000 code samples. So it’s not a small sample. To me, that’s a pretty large sample. And they’re coming up with a 19. 7% instance where the packages and code development, it was pointing to packages that didn’t even exist.

 

[00:23:55.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

When we talk about how code works and it goes to different things. And worse than that, what they found was that code packets that were similarly named but not identically named were chosen over and over and over again by the AI tools, which from a hacker’s perspective or from a security perspective is a nightmare. So you ask ChatGPT to make you a plugin and it grabs this extrapolation from something, throws it in there. It might not be real code. It might be from some hacking Black Hat thing. Now you’ve put something in your site where you might be sending your customers data somewhere. You might be doing something really crazy, but you don’t know it because you don’t write code. You ask ChatGPT to write you code.

 

[00:24:42.680] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, you’re totally right. And I also… That article came on my radar. I was going to read it, as I do with a lot of stuff.

 

[00:24:53.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

I thought it was fantastic.

 

[00:24:55.530] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I’ll go and have a read of it because… Right. But my attention span hasn’t been great for years, but getting involved with web development design has reduced it even more. But I tend to listen to audiobooks when I’m walking, exercising. That’s when I’m more thinking about things, right? But when I’m in front of this screen, I’m all over the place. And I actually think being involved in this industry has made that worse for me. But I don’t want to come across that in this first half, we’re really knocking it, because I use, probably to market the business, to help me with the video, I’m producing content at a very high pace, aren’t I, Kerr? I think even you have been impressed about how even Chris, from another friend of the show, Chris from Litty, said, I ‘I don’t know how you do it, Jonathan. ‘ I took that as a great compliment. You actually said, ‘I have no idea how you’re doing all this, ‘ because I’m all over the internet, am I not? But to do that, I use a lot, but I I just don’t write an article. I use AI to assist me, but I research it and I manipulate it, I edit it, I have a quick read of it, I go through it.

 

[00:26:30.060] – Jonathan Denwood

It always has either out-of-date data or incorrect data. Always. But it saves me a ton of time But there are people out there say that you can use AI and just produce 500 articles and just put them on the internet.

 

[00:26:57.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

And rank on the first page in Google.

 

[00:27:00.920] – Jonathan Denwood

It could happen. I could tell you that. And it’s just propaganda. It’s just nonsense. It’s just utter dribble, isn’t it?

 

[00:27:13.530] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think of it like this, and I’m all about analogies. Can I build a bird house? Yes. Would I use a screwdriver, screws, a saw, a hammer, some nails? Yeah, probably. Does that mean I should buy a compressor, a 50-foot hose, and an automated nail gun that does three different sizes of nails and a table saw and all these things? No, no, right? It doesn’t fit the use case. And so when I run into hobbyists or course creators with a one site project or something like that, and they want to dive in with all these expert pro-level tools, it doesn’t make sense because it’s like, I literally had someone show me. They said, Hey, I asked AI these simple questions, and it gave me this output. And did you look at this? And I was like, Well, show me what you got. And it was three or four hours of talking with AI to get this answer. And I thought, you spent three or four hours asking AI stuff that you don’t even know if the answer is right or wrong. It’s incredible to me the investment people are willing to make in this tool that they’re told is easy and accurate when it’s not easy and accurate.

 

[00:28:33.080] – Jonathan Denwood

You have to- That’s what all these tools, we were doing a review of a number of tools, and the main one we were reviewing on Tuesday, Gamma, it’s very impressive.

 

[00:28:44.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

That was impressive.

 

[00:28:45.310] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s the impressive tool, isn’t it? But there’s others that the amount of learning you have to do with the improvement that you’re going to get, it doesn’t balance out. A lot of these AI tools at the present moment, they’re in that area where it’s not worth the squeeze. It’s not worth the amount of effort to learn them for the improvement you’re going to get. No, it just isn’t. That’s where we are. But obviously, we’re still in early days. So we’re going to end the first half of the show, folks. If you got any response to this, the best way is to go to the WP tonic YouTube channel, and the whole episode is going to be up on the WP Tonic channel. And we love your comments, your feedback. Also, you can always join this show live at around 9: 00 AM on Thursday, Pacific Standard Time, with your inputs. That’s great as well. So we’re going to end the first half of the show. In the second half, I want us to have a general discussion about where it came from. My own personal views, I’m going to be quite controversial in my statements.

 

[00:30:07.670] – Jonathan Denwood

Should be entertaining. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. Before we go into the second half, I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress partner, let’s say you’re a freelancer and you’re taking on a a large membership or community-focused website using Fluent Community or BuddyBoss, and you’re taking on a big job, and you love a hosting partner, but much more a partner that’s got the experience that you haven’t, so you can actually bid for these type of jobs. Why don’t you look at becoming a partner with WP Tonic? To find more, all you have to do is go over to wp-tonic. Com/partners. Com/partners. Partners, wp-tonic. Com/partners. Let’s build something special together. So let’s go into it. I think what we were saying in the first half is that I think I am no expert on this. I’m just a person that interested in the subject, and so I’m dangerous. But I really, really think that a lot of this comes from a total misunderstanding what is a large language model, and then mixing it with the general discussion or the promise of general AI intelligence.

 

[00:31:44.770] – Jonathan Denwood

I something that we would classify as having independent consciousness. And all of this has all been jumbled up. Experts, people that everybody’s got their own opinion and they got every right to their opinion, but it’s all been jumbled into a real hot mess. How would you respond to this, Kurt?

 

[00:32:18.330] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I agree with the hot mess thing. If I were going to be more direct in how I feel like the outcome or the output would be, I think about, well, you mentioned the news, right? We could all mention five or six news channels right off the top of the bat that we know their names, and then we would say, Oh, I saw it on so and so. And then you would go, yeah, whatever. I don’t believe it. It’s propaganda. It’s whatever. The more tools that come out in the AI space that seem superfluous or ineffective or bizarre, I think more and more it’s going to drive people over the next couple of it’s going to drive people more and more to dismiss AI products, and people will crave one-on-one, person-to-person, eye-contact-eye-contact connections and relationships more than ever. I feel it’s more important now to double down on your profession authority to become the expert in your field, because when all this washes over, people are going to want to find you and ask you a question or for consultants consulting or for the next steps because AI is getting jumbled up.

 

[00:33:35.690] – Jonathan Denwood

I think it’s useful. I’ll let you be the judge. This is only going to be my opinion, folks, but it’s based on my own research, is that people like the internet. Where did the internet come from? The internet came from academia, but its funding came from the defense industry. And from the US government because it wanted a more robust communication network that was resistant to wide nuclear attack that could be enabled different elements of government and the armed forces of America under extreme stress to be able to communicate with one another. And they funded various universities, and that funding was the origins of the Internet. What people are not aware of is that artificial intelligence and large language models have been around since the 1950s. It was, at best, an interesting part of science, but it got to the stage that Especially in the late, well, the mid ’80s and then into the ’90s, there was great promise into it, but it fundamentally, through being able to talk to your computer, there was various software you could talk to the computer, blah, blah, blah, and it would write for you. It just wasn’t panning out.

 

[00:35:29.510] – Jonathan Denwood

It was cold fusion, or fusion in general. It’s always five years coming, right? That changed because a load of money was thrown at it, and that money came from Homeland Security, from the intelligence services of this country, because after 9/11, they wanted to monitor everybody’s discussions, email, voice, Zoom, all communication. And they didn’t want to go through the normal legal practice of going through the FASA courts, which is a quasar legal way. So the government, for understandable reasons, wants to observe individuals that might be involved in forms of terrorism. They don’t want to to go through the normal legal system. So they built, and this has all been out there, whatever your views on Mr. Snowdon and other people that have leaked this information, they wanted to build systems that could monitor, because you couldn’t hire an army of people. You would have to hire the half the population of America to watch the other half, right? So they invested enormous amounts of money into large learning models because it’s the technology that enables them to do mass surveillance. That’s the fact of it, Kurt.

 

[00:37:11.450] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Well, it’s just like we voluntarily surveil ourselves on Facebook. How many movies point that out where the government was like, How do we collect all this information on people? And they were like, We don’t have to anymore. We can just go to Facebook. They put it on themselves.

 

[00:37:25.920] – Jonathan Denwood

A large learning model It’s amazing mathematics, it is amazing. Mathematics is truly, and through this enormous investment, OpenAI, it didn’t Obviously, they took concepts, this idea, but the money behind it, the money that was pushing the science behind learning, came from Homeland Security. It’s not publicized that well or that much because they don’t want to talk about it. Because they know it would really get people worked up, so they don’t want to talk about it. But that’s where the money came from. And OpenAI not AI. They’ve improved it. So we ended up with learning language models that do an amazing things. It is not conscious. It knows nothing. It is a high-level form of mathematics that does amazing predictions, almost using the power of the internet and computer power can make a likely predictions about one word following another word or identifying patterns. And it does an amazing job. It’s amazing technology, but it is in no shape or form, learns, has prior knowledge, has experience, wisdom, has insight, have all the things around what a conscious mind should have. Well, I exclude most Americans because they don’t show any of those abilities. Sorry, I’ll be funny there.

 

[00:39:24.860] – Jonathan Denwood

But it’s not intelligent. So what’s your reaction to what I’ve just outlined?

 

[00:39:34.730] – Kurt von Ahnen

As you were talking, I just thought next week we’re going to have to talk about how the CIA invented Bitcoin.

 

[00:39:40.450] – Jonathan Denwood

Some of the technology behind that was developed for the CIA.

 

[00:39:47.520] – Kurt von Ahnen

So, yeah, it’s not surprising, right? But people in general, in general, not just Americans, are lazy They don’t care about the origin or something or where it came from. They’re just like, Hey, is that the easy button? Show me how the easy button works, and I’m going to make magic. And folks, that’s a lie that has been sold to people since they invented the wheel?

 

[00:40:16.660] – Jonathan Denwood

I’m not making a political or moral judgment about it because it’s a gray area. We do rely on security services to stop people doing horrible things. And they are a necessary evil. You can have a naive attitude that we don’t need these type of services, but I think that’s naive. But on the other hand, I think there’s a balance, isn’t there? But we got to understand the scenario. I want to go on to the next bit. In my opinion, I love feedback from the audience about this, it’s at best a… Have you heard this term called the mechanical turk?

 

[00:41:13.740] – Kurt von Ahnen

No.

 

[00:41:15.160] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, it was in the 17th century. There was a man that went around Europe to some of the biggest courts, and he had a machine that could play chess and it could win. And he would put up a bounty. If you can play my… You had to put in a certain amount of money to play. And if you could beat this mechanical turk, you get the pot, right? Well, funny enough, the mechanical turk kept on winning all the time. That’s a surprise, isn’t it? Well, there was There was a small person, a dwarf.

 

[00:42:03.460] – Kurt von Ahnen

Inside the machine.

 

[00:42:05.050] – Jonathan Denwood

The dwarf was an expert chess player, one of the best in Europe at that time. The whole thing was a con, right? Most things on the internet. That’s what a learning management system is. It’s a glorified mechanical that does amazing things, but it’s not consciousness. Now, there are people out there, like I said, I’m not an expert, but there’s people out there that say that it is conscience. It has become conscious. We’re just not aware of it. In my opinion, they’ve lost the plot. I follow the opinion of one of the greatest English physicists who’s still alive, called Roger Penrose. He’s actually 93. He’s Sir Roger Penrose, but he’s as sharp as they come. He’s 93, and he’s like, He’s wrote a number of books. Two of them that influenced me the most was The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. His idea is That consciousness is really a quantum fin. When you get into the world of quantum mechanics, I’m totally lost. I don’t have the mathematical knowledge, and the general discussion totally loses me. But he says that we only ever get a thinking machine is when we have quantum computing.

 

[00:44:01.490] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s why Google, Microsoft, Oracle, you name it, that’s why they’re investing a ton of money in quantum computing. But I don’t have the intellectual capacity to make a judgment call on Roger Penrose’s argument, but I’ve studied it. Obviously, he’s retired almost 20, 30 years now, but he’s totally sharp still. He was a leading physicist in quantum mechanics, and he would still be seen as one of the leaders in the field. I think he’s correct. You only ever see true general intelligence is when you have true quantum computing available. And yeah, they’re improving it, but it’s a bit like cold. It’s a bit like fusion. It’s always five years. Oh, we’re going to be able to do it in five years. Maybe in the next five years, they will be able to do it. Who knows? They They’re not making steady improvements, but they still got enormous technical hurdles to overcome. I’ve ranted on a bit. Did it make any sense, Gert, and how would you respond?

 

[00:45:28.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

It did, but But I do want to drive us back to the title and purpose of the show with, how do we think it’s going as we wrap up here, how is it going to affect WordPress freelancers and agencies? So we’ve talked about the origin of AI and different associated ideas with it. But in the end, over the next 18, 24 months, how do you think it’s going to affect freelancers and agencies?

 

[00:45:57.670] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, none can say. I I think there’s two paths this might go. There’s the first path, that it’s very similar to the internet boom years. A enormous amount of capital has been invested in AI, and my opinion, probably too much. And you’ll get a similar situation, what happened to the dot-com bust. People have got too high expectations. It’s been pushed too far. Too much nonsense has been discussed. But at the core of it, I think the core ability to enable people to be more effective, be able to do more with their time, to be more productive is there. I don’t think it’s like cryptocurrency. I think the cryptocurrency boom was based on utter nonsense to some extent, and still is, but that’s my opinion. I think when it comes to AI, there’s definitely more to it, but I do see clear elements of the dot-com bust. But on the other hand, after the collapse and everybody walking away from it, the people that stuck with it, they built Web 2. 0, which is the basis of the modern internet. Obviously, Obviously, the iPhone and what Apple did also had a degree of how the internet grew.

 

[00:47:41.140] – Jonathan Denwood

But there was definitely… Everybody got… For somebody who was around for about 2-3 years, the internet was, Oh, it’s all a load of nonsense, blah, blah, blah. Well, it wasn’t. But the other alternative is that there isn’t a total bust, but people get… As we said in the first half, and we’ve looked at a few, there are a lot of platforms and a lot of SaaS-based AI. Now, every existing SaaS or new SaaS seems to have AI in its name right now, and a lot of it is mediocre and very disappointing. But there are some gems that I use, you use, and we review that are definitely… You can see, but they’re still early. You can see they’re doing good things, but you couldn’t buy them all unless you had a great budget because you end up… So I think there’s clearly the ability to improve improvements and tools I think the real question, are we going to have a dot-com bus scenario, or is it going to deflate slowly, and then we’re going to have a period of more stability, and then as like the Internet, you’re going to see some fantastic tools.

 

[00:49:20.490] – Kurt von Ahnen

I think we’re on similar prayer sheets. I word it differently. I see people just being inundated with nonsense, just with junk. Like you said, everything’s got AI in the name. This does this, this does that. And I think it’s like going to the WordPress repository. There are 60,000 things in there, but I make my living because I’m an expert in 10 solid tools. And I think AI is going to be very similar in that if you apply yourself as an agency or a freelancer, and you become an expert in just two or three of these tools. You can put the blinders on for some of this other stuff, and you hone in your business to niche down on those tools and how they apply to your perfect client, you’re going to be able to weather the storm, sustain it, keep your value, and build what you want to build. But suppose you try to become a generalist and be everything to everybody, and try to know everything about everything. In that case, you’re going to end up knowing nothing about nothing and then struggling. Then you’ll be at the bottom and competing with college students for $500 websites.

 

[00:50:34.690] – Kurt von Ahnen

And that’s not what anybody wants. We want to be in an equitable mindset where we can sell quality products to quality customers. I think it’s a general…

 

[00:50:47.220] – Jonathan Denwood

Because you’ve been in the mechanical industry, in mechanics, in motor sports, and in the car industry. It’s a very similar situation. If someone is only interested in getting the cheapest service for their car, they’re likely to have better processes. They’re not interested. They want it to be affordable. They’re just going to tout the cheapest service they can. Other people are more interested in the value proposition. When other people buy a costly car, they think of going to the dealership. A lot of the time, they’re not right, are they? However, the more educated they are, the less likely they are to visit the dealership for their expensive car, as they’re aware they’re being taken advantage of. But they go and find a third-party specialist, don’t they? And they check the guy out or the woman out, whoever’s running it. It’s similar to web design.

[00:51:46.990] – Kurt von Ahnen

You get it precisely on the head. Because here’s what happens. Have you seen the social media ad for the device that plugs into your car, which provides a code and identifies the issue with your vehicle?

 

[00:51:57.290] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it goes.

 

[00:51:58.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s like 15 bucks, right? So, people buy that, plug it in, and it says, ‘I got a P007 code,’ which indicates an O2 sensor issue. And then they go to a shop and say, ‘I want you to replace the O2 sensor in my car.’ And the shop says, ‘We have to diagnose your car before we install the sensor.’ And that’s 150 bucks plus R&R labor for the sensor. And invariably, people say, I already diagnosed it. I know it’s the oxygen sensor. Just go ahead and put it on. Because they push the easy button. But here’s the news flash. When you have an oxygen sensor code, it is very rarely the oxygen sensor.

 

[00:52:34.140] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s the symptom of the underlying problem. Anybody with any sense would understand that, but a lot of people don’t, do they?

 

[00:52:43.230] – Kurt von Ahnen

That was a perfect example you just brought up, because it comes down to whether you’re driving down to the bottom. Is it a race to the bottom on pricing to try to make people happy in the moment?

 

[00:52:53.490] – Jonathan Denwood

Can anybody, even without the improvement in AI and website builders, build a half-decent website? Will it get any leads? Will it get any traffic? Will it do anything? Will it… However, many businesses don’t want that. It’s just a quick, easy online with the basic facts about the company and the contact details, which nobody’s going to it anyway. That’s all they want. Well, they’re never going to spend a load of money on it anyway, are they? It’s all a load of nonsense to me.

 

[00:53:34.180] – Kurt von Ahnen

Here in my small town, there is a use case for a simple one-page website that can be directed to by Google Maps. To your point, it has an ‘About Us’ and a Contact Us’ section with a form on it, and that’s it. If two people a year convert into customers on that website, the customer is happy. It does what they wanted it to do.

 

[00:53:53.750] – Jonathan Denwood

It’s been like that for a long time, Kirk. A lot of this is… I think I’ve ranted, but I believe Kirk pulled me back. I was going on a rant about quantum computing and Roger Penrose. I was going all places, weren’t I, Kurt? It was pretty impressive, though, in some ways, I think. So, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

 

[00:54:23.500] – Kurt von Ahnen

For business, Manana Nomas. We’d love to have you. Manananomas. Com or any of the socials that end in Nomas. And then on LinkedIn, Kurt von Ahnen. I’m the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn, so when you find me, you know you got me.

 

[00:54:37.860] – Jonathan Denwood

If you want to support the show, go to the WPTonic YouTube channel. Leave any feedback about this show on there. We love to get more feedback about these podcasts and these shows. Join us next week. Next week is going to be our notorious Roundtable show where we have a go at everything and everybody with tongue-in-cheek English or American humor. Well, I think it’s humorous. Join us live for that show, and we’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

 

WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group

Why don’t you sign up and be part of the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get all the best advice and support connected to building your membership or community website on WordPress?

Facebook Group

 

 

Comments are closed.