Except for When…
"AI" take-off *will* be slow ⓧ "AI" solving the solved ⓧ "AI" can't be bothered to take your job
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡
Our technologies are ultimately not contrary to life, but are in fact an extension of life, enabling it to develop yet more options and possibilities at a faster rate. Increasing options and possibilities is also known as progress, so in the end, what the technium brings us humans is progress—Kevin Kelly
📚 Reading
Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow:
I don’t think the economics of AI are well-defined by either “an increase in labor supply,” “an increase in TFP,” or “an increase in capital,” though it is some of each of those. It is more like “some Star Trek technology fell into our backyard, and how long will it take us to figure out how to integrate it with other things humans do?” You can debate how long that will take, but the Solow model, the Romer model and their offshoots will not give us reliable answers.
Tyler Cowen—Marginal Revolution | 4 minutes
If This, Then That, Except for When…
I have had it with AI being sold as if the entire population of working humans has just been too lazy to clean up their act and standardize, systematize, and optimize what they do…Use it to actually solve unsolved things. Solving the already solved is the same thing as high seas piracy, and things rarely ended well for pirates.
Christopher Butler | 3 minuets
AI Is Too Busy To Take Your Job:
In an era of superhuman computing, human labor isn't replaced — it becomes essential again…Will AI take your job? Not if it has something better to do. Call it Poleg’s Paradox: If AI is superhuman, it's a waste of energy to use it for tasks humans can do themselves. Ironically, the more powerful AI becomes, the more work it leaves for the rest of us.
Dror Poleg | 3 minutes
🎧 Listening
Where Crypto Meets AI:
AI lets you create intelligent systems. What crypto is really about is not about intelligence, it's about coordination. It's solving collective action problems and coordination problems, which is, I think of as an orthogonal set, a different set of, of kind of problems to solve versus intelligence…There's a series of things that you need to make progress. And some of those things fall in the category for coordination, collective action.
Chris Dixon: a16z | 38 minutes
An Informational Theory of Life:
Technologies, the things that we call technologies, are themselves a form of life. They're not separate from life. They are a kind of life. And they are also a kind of life with which we think. We think through the technologies which allow us to see the world in a different way, which then allows us to remake the world in a different way.
Sara Imari Walker—The Long Now Foundation | 70 minutes
How To Design Better AI Apps:
I think the promise of AI for many of us is that it gives us software or it allows us to build software that the user can program to do whatever they want using only natural language. The thing that these agents need in order to be able to do anything useful, we call tools…Steve Jobs describes software as a sort of, as a bicycle for the mind. This feels like, I don't know, like a rocket ship for the mind.
Pete Koomen—Y Combinator | 30 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think
2️⃣ years ago—AI Prompt Engineering Isn’t the Future
3️⃣ years ago—When to Design for Emergence