Less Darwin
AI is not Evolution ā§ The Political Economy of AI ā§ The renaissance of the Open Web
šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ā”
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely āE.O. Wilson
š Reading
Why the debate about the future of AI needs less Darwin and more Latour:
We must be mindful of the checks and balances in the development of the networks and systems we share with AIās. Arguments for the unfettered, Darwinian development of AI, such as those laid out in Marc AndreesenāsĀ Techno Optimist Manifesto, are dangerous not because AI will follow an evolutionary route, but because they risk framing humanity as the passive recipient of the technology rather than active agents in its development.
Frames | 4 minutes
The Map is Eating the Territory: The Political Economy of AI
If you want LLMs to have long term value, you need to have an accompanying social system in which humans keep on producing the knowledge, the art and the information that makes them valuable. Intellectual property systems without incentives for the production of valuable human knowledge will render LLMs increasingly worthless over time.
Henry FarrellāProgrammable Mutter | 22 minutes
āWherever you get your podcastsā is a radical statement:
Sometimes without us knowing, radical systems can survive and even thrive in the modern world of tech and media. They can inspire new creators to make similar systems that are unowned, uncentralized, and a little bit uncontrollable. And in this era where we're seeingĀ the renaissance of the open web, they point the way toward a future where [ā¦] there's a way that our lives online could be fully in our own control.
Anil Dash | 5 minutes
š§ Listening
AI and Outsized Expectations:
I'm less excited about generative AI and the consumer applications that we're seeing. I actually think that's gonna be, at least for the time being, less significant than the sort of under the hood, under the fold type improvements that transformer based AI models are gonna deliver [ā¦] the gains we're getting from AI in all kinds of tiny little ways that we really wouldn't notice if we weren't all talking about AI [ā¦] And it probably doesn't improve things in ways that we notice.
Jay GoldbergāThe Circuit | 41 minutes
Demystifying AI:
The only way to make a fuzzy processor function in a critical system is by having large number of evaluations so that it can bound it, creating enough structure around it so that even if it does something weird or crazy, you can actually cut off those particular probability branches of the tree [ā¦] so that even if it does something crazy or stupid, the errors are not continuously compounded over a period of time.
Rohit KrishnanāInfinite Loops | 86 minutes
Yes/No, Vision Pro?
I think Apple positioning spatial computing Is the right way to think about it. It's it's beyond these former frameworks that we were trying. Augmented reality, mixed reality were ideas; they weren't actually implementations maybe and so this is actually an implementation of computers [ā¦] You have to think of this like the new version of the Macintosh and this will borne out its own versions of iPhones and iPads and watches.
Dav MorināMore or Less | 56 minutes
š Timeless
1ļøā£ year agoāWhen The Internet Becomes Chat
2ļøā£ years agoāNotes Against Note-Taking Systems
3ļøā£ years agoāThe Role Of The Non-Expert Specialist
š One More Thing
I bit the bullet and started dabbling in a podcast on the underpinnings of modern business, society, innovation, communication and design. It's unscripted, revelling in eclectics and zig-zags like it's going out of styleānot unlike Thoughtforms āŗļø
It also gets to interesting narratives, causes, and the whys of the current thing. And itās a bit of a guilty pleasure, too. Without further ado: Itās Just a Model.