Calibrating
Calibrating Trust (for AI, of course) ⓧ Defend with Context (for AI, of course) ⓧ Systems Thinking, Now
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡
⛱️ Thoughtforms will be off on a much-needed summer break. The regular schedule resumes on Friday, 19 September ⛱️
📚 Reading
Trust Calibration for AI Software Builders:
If you’re building a coding assistant, content generator, or design tool, implement visible “suggestion boundaries” which make it clear when the AI is offering ideas versus making decisions…For higher-stakes interactions, consider introducing friction. Require explicit confirmation before applying AI suggestions to production code or publishing AI-generated content.
Daniel Botha—The Fly Blog | 9 minutes
AI delivers differentiation. Context drives defensibility.
AI-native companies are largely led by technical founders, specifically people who deeply understand how to work with large language models and instinctively grasp what they can do. They’re not insiders to the industries they’re building in; they’re experts in the toolset. And instead of starting with context, they hire it as early as possible. Nearly every AI-native vertical product we’ve seen is being built this way.
David Haber—X | 3 minutes
Why You Need Systems Thinking Now:
A lot of the rhetoric on innovation focuses on immediate solutions: the moon shot, the silver bullet, the killer app. Such solutions, however, usually create knock-on problems. Systems-thinking innovators seek to create an “ecology of actions” that steadily addresses problems within a system. They look not for leaps but for nudges and experiments that reveal insights into the system and move it forward, until it reaches a tipping point and evolves naturally.
Tima Bansal, Julian Birkinshaw—HBR | 18 minutes
🎧 Listening
A Conversation with Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan:
When we say AI as normal technology, it's not just a prediction about the future, really the core point is that we have the agency to shape it as normal technology. we have the agency to ensure that the path through which it diffuses through society is not governed by the logic of the technology itself, but rather by humans and institutions.
Live with Tim O’Reilly | 58 minutes
All Business Is Show Business:
We'll just not know who is useful and who is useless, which means everyone is useful. The more people you have and the more opportunity you create for them to experiment and express their unique skills or passions, the more productive you'll be as a societ. The logic of our institutions should be to enable as many people to experiment as freely as possible. which is really really fun if you think about it, so that's that's where i'm hoping we're going.
Dror Poleg—Ollie on Work | 34 minutes
Performative Intelligence:
There's sort of endless prognostications on how AI is going to decimate the white collar, middle management class. That refrain is getting stronger, so there's this urgency to get smart, to figure out how we can absorb information inside of this tsunami better. How do we consume media? How are we active participants? How do we get smarter?…knowledge becomes performative.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 56 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—The big stack game of LLM poker
2️⃣ years ago—Now is the time for grimoires
3️⃣ years ago—Don’t Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation