Cultural Transmission
LLMs as cultural technology ⓧ To own the future, read Shakespeare ⓧ The future shape of software organisations
👋 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. All they have is secrecy and fear. And fear is the great destroyer — Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
ChatGPT is an engine of cultural transmission:
Human beings learn in two kinds of ways - by imitating and by innovating […] LLMs are incapable of innovating, but they are good at imitating, and for some purposes at least, they are much better at it than human beings. That is why we can think of LLMs as a cultural technology. A lot of human culture involves imitation rather than innovation…
Henry Farrell—Programmable Mutter | 10 minutes
To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare:
If the current narrative holds—if AI is victorious—well, liberal arts types will be ascendant. Because rather than having to learn abstruse, ancient systems of rules and syntaxes (mathematical notation, C++, Perl) in order to think higher thoughts, we will be engaged with our infinitely patient AI tutors/servants like Greek princelings, prompting them to write code for us, make spreadsheets for us, perform first-order analysis of rigid structures for us.
Paul Ford—Wired | 7 minutes
Asset-light Software Businesses: The New Paradigm for Startups
What if future software organizations look like marketing orgs? Senior strategists, creatives, and leaders would manage automated systems in lieu of junior developers to deliver work at scale […] Technology moves operational leverage up the business chain […] Generative AI enables every clerk to become an analyst, every writer to become an editor, and every developer to become an architect.
John Kennedy, Will Manidis—Every | 13 minutes
🎧 Listening
2024’s Top Geopolitical Risks:
Now we're raising people in America through algorithms, algorithmically. And that is not raising them to be good citizens and to be functional as human beings. It's raising them to divide and to hate and to feel anger and to feel tribal and to be better consumers and more addicted. But algorithms do not replace nurture. They really don't. And there's no regulation around this. The business models are anti-human.
Ian Bremmer—The Prof G Pod | 69 minutes
Navigating Complex Systems:
If the human race does not exist in a hundred years, it is almost definitionally because of some knock-on consequence of the invention of the internet. If the human race ceases to exist, and the internet was necessary in the causal path to get to there, then I would regret the internet. In every other case, I would not regret the internet [...] I think that the internet is the capital G, capital W, Great Work of the human race in a lot of respects; that it is magical.
Patrick McKenzie—Conversations with Tyler | 65 minutes
What Can Save the News Business?
Laws exist to reinforce our societies and ecosystems. How should this work? And how does the law need to evolve to accommodate it? […] And the sad reality is, this is going to come down a lot to lobbying and power and not about what's right. And that's the real liability here with these things; The Newyork Times can play a 10-year game on this; OpenAI will play a 10-year game on this […] this is unfortunately going to be a power game, not a what's right game.
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 50 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Prompt Windows
2️⃣ years ago—Money-Go-Round
3️⃣ years ago—A prosocial social network