Different Paths
Universal Remote Employees; Who benefits from automation; AI looks like a bubble
👋 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 chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
📝 This week, the bookmark list captures 41 articles, and that's a bit of a record (even with the tailwind of ChatGPT). If you have never peeked at this list before, you may want to give it a go this time ‘round.
John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence:
[I]f 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this.
Dallas Innovates | 24 minutes
The Collective Intelligence Institute:
The question of who should benefit from automation is always urgent, and it's also always up for grabs. Automation can deepen and reinforce unfair arrangements, or it can upend them. No one came off a mountain with two stone tablets reading "Thy machines shall condemn labor to the scrapheap of the history while capital amasses more wealth and power." We get to choose.
Cory Doctorow—Pluralistic | 5 minutes
AI Looks Like a Bubble:
New tech allows for new opportunities, but that doesn’t mean returns will be distributed equally. A market is still subject to market dynamics, regardless of the level of science involved. AI will change the world, it will make us question what it means to be alive, and there is a chance it will make us a multi-planetary species. But I’m not convinced that just being a company that sells AI will deliver judicious year-over-year returns.
Evan Armstrong—Napkin Math | 16 minutes
🎧 Listening
The state of optimism, was Steve Jobs a psychopath?
He was clearly one of those wild, kind of impractical, visionary, optimist people that created hugely aspirational goals for an organisation. What would the value system be of a company that was led by an optimist versus led by a pragmatist? The whole idea of that [Think Different] campaign was the people that break rules, the people that think differently, the people that set higher goals for themselves and for others [..] It's meant to be a reflection of the aspirations of a company.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 57 minutes
Generative Search:
When you change how everything works, you sort of reset the market; the entrenched abilities and the inertia go away and get reset, which is one aspect of the 'is this a threat to Google' conversation [..] Simply doing a new search engine with a completely new user interface could be an opportunity to take share, even if it's actually just a front-end on the same thing you had before.
Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 35 minutes
AI, Crypto, 1000 Elon Musks, Regrets, Vulnerabilities, & Managerial Revolution:
[M]anagers are often very good at running things at scale. And we have [..] all these things that are running at giant levels of scale, which was new in the 20th century [..] But there's sort of a consequence of that, which is managers don't build new things. They're not trained to do it, they don't have the background to do it, they don't have the personality to do it, they don't have the temperament to do it, and they don't have the incentives to do it.
Marc Andreessen—The Lunar Society | 79 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
This week we launched the sister newsletter, Scenius Mag. It collects the tales of non-zero-sum games that creators and operators play to get extraordinary things done, to the benefit of all, without surrendering their agency to technology.
It scratches our itch about the management culture of the post-World Ward II corporation being at odds with these kinds of infinite games. Here is the unique opportunity to affect the nature of this future, and we are damned to let that drown out in business-dude lorem ipsum.
As you can probably tell, Scenius Mag will be opinionated and edgy—'brutal' as one reviewer called it; it will go out of its way to cultivate systematic doubt and a matching culture of skilfully responding. It will also be one heck of a ride.