Don't be fooled
Escaping the AI hype cycle ā§ The "reliable AI" paradigm shift ā§ Much āAIā is Just Outsourcing
šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ā”
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 āE.O. Wilson
š Reading
Dragged into the AI hype cycle:
What we fear about artificial intelligences is that they will become copies of our minds, but will lack any sympathy or sense of fellowship with us. Actually, we can take this further by asking what we fear aboutĀ thatĀ notion; after all, ravens and octopuses have self-aware minds, even if those arenāt like ours. Why arenāt we afraid of them? Itās because we fear AI will become a copy not of our minds, but of ourĀ power, independent of any governance that might direct it to a humanistic end.
Karl SchroederāUnapocalyptic | 10 minutes
Why reliable AI requires a paradigm shift:
One of the critical challenges in addressing the real-world implications of language model hallucinations isĀ the difficulty in effectively communicating the limitations of these systems to end-users. LLMs are trained to produce fluent, coherent outputs that appear plausible, even when factually incorrect. If the end-users of an AI system are not sufficiently informed to review the system's output with a critical eye, they may never spot any hallucinations.
Alejandro Piad MorffisāMostly Harmless Ideas | 14 minutes
Donāt Be Fooled: Much āAIā is Just Outsourcing, Redux:
The future of work is not a technology: itās an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. āAIā is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs haveĀ alreadyĀ gone ā offshore ā and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots arenāt ātaking our jobsā ā people are.
Janet VertesiāTech Policy | 4 minutes
š§ Listening
Is AI a platform shift or a paradigm shift?
we don't have a theory actually of how LLMs work. We know what they're doing, but we also don't really know why it works. We don't have a theory of whether or not they would stop scaling [ā¦] You can't do a scatter plot and say, well, people are here and dogs are here and horses are and an octopus is here and ChatGPT is here and [ā¦] on the 17th of December, 2027, at current growth rates, it will hit dogs.
Benedict EvansāThe MAD Podcast | 52 minutes
OpenAI, IP Theft and a New Incentive Structure for the Internet:
The thing that has me so fired up about this, which is that here's a bunch of teams, not just one, but many AI teams standing on the precipice of making a moral decision. They knew they either needed to pay for it or steal it, and some of the teams chose to steal it instead of paying for it [ā¦] There were two directions, and the choice was explicitly made to go the immoral direction.
Dave MorināMore or Less | 51 minutes
AI in the future of work:
The key idea, which is that AI, unlike previous technologies, is self-learning. And that then starts having an impact on talent as well because one of the advantages of talent has been learning advantages [ā¦] The talent versus labor distinction, to a large extent, is to what extent does a learning advantage lead to an improvement in your skill premium?And what AI again does is it attacks that learning advantage because AI is a learning technology as well.
Sangeet Paul ChoudaryāAmplifying Cognition | 40 minutes
š Timeless
1ļøā£ year agoāHow to be a hands-on citizen
2ļøā£ years agoāTwitter, and Elonās World of Pain
3ļøā£ years agoāWorld Building