Creative Superhumans
The "Metaverse", Generative AI, and the Last Earth
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
Solitary Confinement:
And it would make "the metaverse” a place you commute to and long to leave behind in your off hours — in a sense it is the opposite of the internet, which serves as a mode of escape that is shot through an office worker’s day, a means for stealing time back from the company. The corporate metaverse is an effort to abolish that escape route.
Rob Horning—Internal exile | 8 minutes
AI and the Age of Creative Superhumans:
Innovation is now distributed and breakneck. The dry brush of a hyper-networked world, broad technical literacy, the open source movement and on-demand computing, all create conditions for the rapid spread of new technological ideas and capabilities. Generative AI is a wildfire, capturing the attention of non-technical users and thousands of developers looking to profit from what seems to have been a fundamental technological shift.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 9 minutes
Designing for the Last Earth:
We need stewards in design who can help people rediscover what is meaningful and step away (even if momentarily) from the clinical lens of business logic by which design has merely become a business tool (read: design thinking). As human beings, we can’t understand nor explore when acting purely on logic. Imagination is critical.
Angelos Arnis—Joint Frontiers | 13 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Future of AI:
[T]here's nothing that allowed us to coordinate at scale until this technology became good enough, fast enough and cheap enough, which is basically now [..] And it flips the narrative from these big AIs in the middle coordinating and serving your information to change your mind, instead the intelligence is being at the edge and giving you the information that you need to go and make a change in the world or yourself.
Emad Mostaque—Infinite Loops | 74 minutes
A Dialogue With [a] Technology Optimist:
I think that if a technology can create just one per cent more good than bad, then it's worth doing because of compounding interest. One per cent compounded over years and decades is very powerful. So I have a very low bar, in a certain sense, for what's a positive calculus on technology. If we can show that a technology is one per cent better than it's bad, then that's a net good, and we proceed.
Kevin Kelly—HistoryDAO | 63 minutes
Deep Simplicity – Designing our Way Out of Complexity:
Our lives have accreted complexity since the beginning of the Internet, which is ironic because the Internet was supposed to promise for us to have control over things [..] It's complexity that's connected to quantity: by its nature, a network will grow exponentially; [..] It's also an issue of quality: [..] there are more things to be designed right now than there are good designers.
Nick Law—NEXT22 | 32 minutes
📬 Suggestions?
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