👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
Organizations & Network Swarms:
The idea that a random internal employee can build a “following” inside of a company, all from their laptop located anywhere in the world, bringing their full work and personal identities into the conversation? This could reshape everything we think about power, influence, and organizations. In fact, we are already starting to see it.
Paul Millerd — Pathless | 16 minutes
Against Scale:
A scalable business can be easily reproduced, because its internal mechanisms maintain their efficiency, and their profitability, regardless of context […] we call such expansion “growth,” as though we were speaking of something alive. But it’s not alive; it’s a cousin of death, and it has made life, with its nonscalable elements […] seem like an impediment, a spanner in the works grinding the great churn of expansion to a halt.
Claire L. Evans — Grow | 11 minutes
Effective Obfuscation:
When you can convince everyone that AI might turn everyone into paperclips tomorrow, or on the flip side might cure every disease on earth, it’s easy to distract people from today’s issues of ghost labor, algorithmic bias, and erosion of the rights of artists and others. This is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI.
Molly White | 12 minutes
🎧 Listening
OpenAI and the Culture of Silicon Valley:
The downstream effects of a director at Google making a decision can literally impact the lives of thousands of people and in many cases wipe out entire categories of media […] But in the old days, moving your company horizontally or vertically in a way that wiped out an entire category was difficult because it wasn't software. It didn't have that ability to be deployed and optimized instantly against millions, if not billions of people […] there's a massive power imbalance.
Troy Young — People vs Algorithms | 44 minutes
AI: Grappling with a New Kind of Intelligence
The only example that we have of an entity that can manipulate language is other humans. So when we see something that can manipulate language flexibly, we assume that entity will have the same type of intelligence as humans. But it's just not true […] they are somewhat specialized and they're very stupid in many ways. So partly they're stupid because they are only trained on language and most of human knowledge has nothing to do with language.
Yann LeCun — World Science Festival | 115 minutes
Sam Altman, OpenAI, the Microsoft Bull Case, and AI Live Players:
What's nice about the for-profit model is that it does give you some guardrails on is what you're doing actually having an impact on the world […] Does it allow you to sell a product people want to buy for more than it costs you to make? And if you can do that, you have a pretty strong prior that you are actually doing something impactful […] You don't have to persuade people about your mission. You just have to persuade customers that your product is better than the next best alternative.
Byrne Hobart—The Riff | 55 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago: The Lifecycle of Uncomfortable Tech
2️⃣ years ago: When Is a New Tech' Ahead of Its Time’ — Or Just Doomed?
3️⃣ years ago: More Kuaishou, Less TikTok