👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this summer’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this summer’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
👩🎨 Why Build in Web3:
All of this means that — at least in theory — it can be much easier to launch a product in Web3. Even an unknown entrepreneur can build products that plug into an existing network without permission from an established platform. Indeed, taken to the limit, in Web3, users sometimes have no need to trust the company (or people) behind a project; rather, they just have to trust the code itself.
8-minute read by Jad Esber, Scott Duke Kominers in Harvard Business Review
👮 What It Really Means to “Hold Big Tech Accountable”:
Companies should design products with the expectation that bad actors will abuse them. If there is a “hero-use case,” the paradigmatic usage of a product by a well-meaning user, then there is also a “villain-use case”: core ways that a user with ill intent can abuse the same product. Because there is no way to eliminate this risk of abuse, companies should also mitigate the harms they facilitate.
20-minute read by Brian Fishman in Lawfare
💆 AI risk is Modern Eschatology:
AI today is an idiot savant. Everyone can see that. Now imagine a world where they become better. Where they are able to solve multiple types of challenges, becoming more than mere tools. Where they are able to autonomously be able to run entire experiments end to end [..] These AIs will have the ability to lie to us about what it is actually doing - whether that is intentional or just through pure goodharting.
14-minute read by Rohit in Strange Loop Canon
🎧 Listening
👩⚖️ Rewriting the Rules of Capitalism and Public Investment:
The word 'capitalism' is thrown around a lot, and we sometimes forget how many different types of capitalisms there are. There is a variety of capitalisms and in some countries we have a very dysfunctional form of capitalism [..] There is nothing inevitable about that; that's an outcome of specific decisions that have been made by companies in terms of just maximizing their shares as opposed to maximizing perhaps something else that we could call stakeholder.
44 minutes with Mariana Mazzucato on The Prof G Pod
🤹 How Misfits Succeed:
It's filtering out people that don't fit; it's filtering out misfits. And at the end, you have people that are really, really good at doing certain things and no good at doing other things, but those other things are needed! It's a strength because you have all these people that are very, very good at doing certain things—like showing up on time. But it's a weakness because they don't have the creativity, the imagination, the intuition; all that stuff has been filtered out.
94 minutes with Avram Miller on Christopher Lochhead
👩🏻💻 The Days of the Employee Are Dead:
It's a natural progression: you should think like a business. Businesses in their right mind wouldn't have this one big customer as their one source of income. And the pandemic put a tailwind in this idea that—I call it an open secret in tech—others are doing 2, 3 jobs already [..] Let's normalize this idea that the days of the employer are dead; that social contract has been long dead [..] Why not take some control back?
35 minutes with Isaac P. on Danny in the Valley
📬 Suggestions?
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