Most wine AI ideas are Rube Goldberg machines

Simple, human problems need simple, human answers. Tech that promises "simple" solutions is usually painfully complex.

Last year I was confidently told that “the digital wine value chain” would be so dramatically transformed by Artificial Intelligence that it would take “all intermediaries like agents… out of the equation.”

Well that’s me stuffed. Joe.bot will be along presently.

For many people reading this post… that also means you. Agents, importers, distributors, online merchants, buyers… writers, and even influencers¹. If you just drink the stuff, welcome to your robot overlor… AI sommelier.

So will it? Will we all lose our jobs to AI?

I’m going to stick my neck out and say no. Or at least not yet. Because most wine AI ideas are Rube Goldberg Machines. A Rube Goldberg machine is a

contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.

Here’s one of Rube Goldberg’s most famous creations from 1931, “Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin”²

The full details are in the footnotes. They’re very long and I didn’t want to break the flow of the text. Rube Goldberg was American. And his life (1883 – 1970) overlapped considerably with British cartoonist W Heath Robinson (1872 – 1944). Heath Robinson was also famed for his “whimsically elaborate machines to achieve simple objectives”. Here’s The Wart Chair, “a simple device for removing a wart from the top of the head”.

You don’t need me to tell you that the comedy comes from the word “simple”³. I get to see a lot of pitches and investment decks for “AI-powered” wine innovations (they sent to me for *reasons*). They are almost all “simple” solutions to problems that are - by and large - broadly solved pretty well by humans right now. In spite of being “simple” solutions they also involve the computer equivalent of Professor Nutt’s napkin thingy. And a special chair to remove a head wart.

In their work Goldberg and Robinson satirised the Second Industrial Revolution of the 1920’s and 30’s. Yes, it brought immense optimism about technological progress. But with it came anxiety about the dehumanization and over-mechanization of life⁴.

Sound familiar?

Today we’re living through Fourth Industrial Revolution. An age defined by “cyber-physical systems” that integrate digital, physical, and biological technologies. An era of Artificial intelligence (AI), Big data, The Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics and automation. Not to mention a rapid rise in acronyms and initialisms⁵. Another moment marked by anxiety about the dehumanization and over-mechanization of life. An anxiety reflected in the pile of books by my bed⁶.

So what’s it going to look like for wine?

The danger of a “Birmingham screwdriver”

I’m no Luddite. I pay to be a member of Reforge, I use a ReMarkable 2, ChatGPT, and Otter.ai… So I take the prediction below seriously enough to bother reading it:

Imagine you had an IoT oracle generating data about your winemaking processes that is loaded into the Cloud where it’s integrated with the blockchain where smart contracts automate all your transactions and an AI algorithm did a predictive analysis on your markets.

Now I’ll admit that the first time I read this my reaction was typical of anyone who grew up in nineties Britain.

I shouted #parklife⁷

That done, I considered if there was an alternative. I mean, who knows. Maybe we’ve already found a “simple” way of doing all this.