Firmware
Competing for AI Alignment ⓧ The Technological Profane ⓧ Narrative As Firmware
👋 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 ⚡
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
Remarks on AI from NZ:
What people worry about is that we’ll somehow end up with AIs that can hurt us, perhaps inadvertently like horses, or deliberately like bears, or without even knowing we exist, like hornets driven by pheromones into a stinging frenzy. I am hoping that even in the case of such dangerous AIs we can still derive some hope from the natural world, where competition prevents any one species from establishing complete dominance.
Neal Stephenson | 11 minutes
Dispatch from the Trenches of the Butlerian Jihad:
It’s not just more Luddism. Many people — though hardly all, given the popularity of AI products — sense that there is something grotesque about these simulacra, the people who push them on us, this whole affair. That aversion to the technological profane holds even when various stated objections to AI are supposedly addressed or nitpicked to death
ADH—solarshades.club | 15 minutes
Narrative As Firmware:
Most corporations treat narratives, if they have one at all, as software: easy to deploy, easy to tweak, updated often. They put out content marketing here, campaigns there, some boilerplate on a pitch deck, the ‘About Us’ section on a website, an elevator pitch, and maybe a shiny new rebrand. If it doesn’t work, they patch and move on, building up narrative debt over time. Superior narratives don’t work that way. They act like firmware.
Paul Worthington—Off Kilter | 7 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Future of Programming, AI Agents, and the Agentic Web:
The most important thing about agents is probably the product making part of them. The most interesting startups that I'm seeing right now are not trying to innovate by building some kind of differentiated infrastructure. They're innovating because they think they have an understanding of a problem that someone has that is better than anyone else … And that's what's going to dictate the diversity of agents and which things get used for what.
Kevin Scott—Every | 28 minutes
The Coming Transformations in AI:
One of the things I've seen in many different fields of science is many disciplines often have incredibly expensive computational simulators of some process… What you can do is use those simulators as training data for a neural net and then build something that approximates the simulator but now is 300,000 times faster … That fundamentally changes your process of how you do things and will make faster discoveries.
Jeff Dean—Sequoia Capital | 31 minutes
Netflix puts AI ads in paid tier: pirate EVERYTHING at this point
The fact that you could come out here and 🤬🤬 brag about the fact that you know what I'm paying attention to and then literally talk about how you're making your own little 🤬🤬 clean room box for me and my data to give away for other people. Like, no, no, 🤬🤬 you. I don't want to pay $11 a month to be part of some clean room 🤬🤬 experiment. 🤬🤬 you.
Louis Rossmann | 15 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
I had a lovely chat with Oliver about the evolving role of architects in navigating uncertain futures. We tossed around quite a few ideas ☺️
Embracing Mindset Shifts in a World of Ecosystems and AI:
It's not about you, it's not your ecosystem. You cannot build it, you cannot buy it, you cannot design it. You can be part of it... what you can design is your position in the ecosystem and how you will interact with it.
Architect Tomorrow | 5 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—There Are Things That Machines Can’t Do (And Never Will)
2️⃣ years ago—Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already
3️⃣ years ago—The Age Of Tokies