All the World's a Lab
Changes in Knowledge Work ⓧ Lessons from R&D Labs ⓧ Ode to Passive Learning
👋 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 ⚡
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 —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
7 Changes to Knowledge Work:
Rather than being polarizing, you can instead be unconventional, and weird. The stranger, nerdier, and more depth you pursue a particular area the more you stand out, so the irony is that the less you do, as long as it’s unconventional, the more you stand out. Today’s work equation is to do less, and do what is unconventional.
David Sherry—The Elevator | 6 minutes
Lessons from history’s greatest R&D labs:
The current state of the AI field is similar to the state of the electricity field between the work of Michael Faraday and Edison’s lighting projects. This was an era in which new electrical findings were being pieced together, but few had made any progress in turning the potential of electricity into great applications […] Whether AI does reach that level of promise, to me, is a question of human ingenuity.
Eric Gilliam—Answer.AI | 46 minutes
Active vs. Passive Learning:
You let your mind wander with no intended destination. You read and learn broadly, talk to people from various backgrounds, and stumble haphazardly across topics you had never considered but spark your curiosity, often because it’s the topic you happen to need at that specific time of your life. I can’t be alone in realizing that most of what I’ve learned in life has come from passive learning.
Morgan Hausel—Collab Fund | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
Will AI Video Replace Hollywood?
That is part and parcel of [Dennis Villeneuve] having a distinct vision of what he wants to present. I would expect, that even if Sora becomes phenomenally capable, the ability to go from a vision in the director’s head to a manifestation on the screen that is even remotedly close to that vision, we are very far way from that. In part, because what makes this possible is this huge amount of laten space that is in a few words describing it and the actual manifestation of that.
Ben Thompson—The Ringer | 36 minutes
Change at CNN and Google:
Now we have this layer of intelligence on top of all information and all the APIs essentially. So we stopped thinking about pages. Instead, now everything is like conversations with smart machines and the machines can respond with text and images and soon video and I guess down the line they'll sense things too […] We've got AI as this new aggregator and my construct that I would encourage, that we should talk about is how do you keep up with the new aggregator?
Troy Young—People v Algorithms | 83 minutes
10 Rules Every Founder Should Know: Inside Anduril’s Secret Comms Strategy
It's just super, super critical to start with the inner circles and go out. Usually if you are trying to announce something or trying to do a rebrand or whatever you're doing, start with the make sure the founders are on the same page, get the executive team, get employees and then go to investors, then go to key customers, then go to influencers and go outward from there.
Lulu Cheng Meservey—Pirate Wires | 70 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist
2️⃣ years ago—The emergence of the “creator” as a cultural archetype
3️⃣ years ago—The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting
🎁 One More Thing
In this week’s episode of It’s Just a Model, Peet and I zig-zag into the Design of Anything by Anyone Anywhere Anytime.