Entertainment Machines
The real danger Of Superhuman AI ⓧ Reminiscing GPT-2 ⓧ Interface of Interfaces
👋 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 ⚡
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think:
Perhaps the ideology of “superhuman” AI, in which humans appear merely as slow and inefficient pattern matchers, could spark an even more expansive and politically significant revival of humane meaning and values. Maybe the moral and experiential poverty of AI will bring the most vitally human dimensions of our native intelligence back to the center of our attention and foster a cultural reclamation and restoration of their long-depreciated value.
Shannon Vallor—Noēma | 16 minutes
GPT-2 five years later:
Controlling the future is difficult: Even if we had succeeded in massively constraining the development and deployment of GPT-2-class models, what effect would that have had? […] Napkin math says training it now costs $250 thanks to a combination of compute and algorithmic improvements. You cannot control a technology which gets more than a hundred times cheaper to do in half a decade. Not a thing!
Jack Clark—Import AI | 28 minutes
The Three-Faced Interface:
The biggest development in our world, though, isn’t just this new breed of corporates obscuring physical supply chains with digital interfaces. Rather, it’s those companies that provide interfaces into the interfaces, the platform corporations that act as infrastructure for all the others. This is Big Tech, and it’s their interfaces that have become the most pervasive, iconic, and inescapable.
Brett Scott—ASoMoCo | 21 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Big Ass Calendar… and Other Things NOT to Google:
if you think about the internet, there's been two narratives for our entire careers about it. One is that it's an entertainment machine, and one is that it's an information machine. And all the high-minded people wanted it to be an information machine […] But the reality is the economics and the incentive of the internet are as an entertainment machine. And that's actually what we've been able to instrument and optimize. That's the incentive structure.
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 49 minutes
Agency Is A Skill:
I think a lot of it is just luck: bumping into the right people who have a kind of mindset that then you can absorb. I did that at an increasingly fast rate as I got further along in my life because I was putting myself in communities that valued that more. It was like my environment was increasingly selecting people who were more agentic than me and who I could learn from.
Cate Hall—The Pathless Pass | 62 minutes
Crafting a powerful vision:
The breakthrough I had was that my most successful professional clients, they were also healthy and they were talking about their spouse in the most beautiful way. And when I saw the pattern, I was like, hey, we've been taught that there's a trade-off. But in my mind, these are communicating vessels-- your health, your relationship, and your world. It wasn't the trade-off. It was the more you invest in any of them, the level rises in all of them
Caterina Kostoula—Lancefield on the Line | 37 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—How do you govern something that's part software and part people?
2️⃣ years ago—When to Design for Emergence
3️⃣ years ago—The fabric of the org is links, not bricks