👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture
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(Photo by Romain HUNEUnsplash
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Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
GPT-4 is founding an Empire of Imagination:
What, in the end, is being transformed by these AIs? It’s nothing less than the relationship between human imagination and reality. We humans possess a power of recursive thought that allows us to imagine pretty much anything. The rub has always been that there is a huge amount of friction — of expertise, technique, and labour — between what we can imagine and what we can make real. Now, at least when it comes to digital entities, that friction is being disappeared
David Mattin—New World Same Humans | minutes
Scale. Skill. Speed.
Not only can individuals now work at the scale of companies by upskilling, unleashing their talent, scaling through their teams, and building reputations as stellar as big firms but large companies now need to re-configure around talent rather than believing talent will cluster around companies. The shift of power from big to small, management to talent, and from the towers of power to the talent with wrenches in the trenches has only just begun.
Rishad Tobaccowala—The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past | minutes
Clippy is Taking My Job:
[A]ny student of complex adaptive systems knows that, at best, you can only try to understand the potential range of outcomes for any system, and, at worst, your predictions will be dead wrong and lead to decisions with negative consequences. Will a world where we operate hands off the wheel for a multitude of decisions lead to better or worse outcomes? Will it lead to faster course corrections or increasing amplitudes of volatility? We shall see.
Brad Slingerlend—SITALWeek | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
Bank failure or culture war?
Time and time again, we come back where there are things that should have been seen and weren't seen by the people who keep telling us how smart they are [..] There are a lot of people that held themselves out to be all-knowing and then proved to be as fallible as the rest of us. When that happens, there tends to be not a lot of accountability.
Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 60 minutes
Instagram’s Founder On Why All Social Media Looks The Same:
Why is it that the only articles that I can consume come from a handful of people who decided to post about them? There are tens of thousands of articles from high-quality publishers published every single day [..] What I was going to say on everything converging to a For-You feed is, this is just the next version of a feed; this is us figuring out there's no reason why we should just serve what other people decided to post; we should just go out and find things for you.
Kevin Systrom—Big Technology Podcast | 52 minutes
The Fallacy and Failure of Leadership:
One of the things I've written about a lot is the failure of leadership; the fact that we ascribe so much to these figures in a way that goes back to the Bronze Age [..] I think it's intrinsically problematic. It's not that people aren't doing that job well—which may be true—but the notion that we should have a system that's based on the charismatic leadership of kings: I think that's dangerous and we're better off as we figure out how to get away from it as quickly as we can.
Stowe Boyd—Dare to Un-Lead | 39 minutes
🏘️ Next Door
Scenius Mag this week dives deeper into the disappearing distance between design and production, between creativity and manufacturing, and between individual expression and top-down authority.