Fabulously Unpredictable
The last page of the Internet, secret cyborgs, and the nature of creation
👋 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⚡️
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 —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
The Last Page Of The Internet:
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based [..] Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed [..] Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
Alex Pareene—Defector | 4 minutes
Detecting the Secret Cyborgs:
Much of the value of AI use comes from people not knowing you are using it. The ability of AI to write in ways that seem human is very powerful, but only if people think it is coming from an actual human [..] We know from research, that when people learn they are receiving AI-created content, they judge it differently than if they assume it comes from a human. Another good reason to keep use secret.
Ethan Mollick—One Useful Thing | 7 minutes
The Creative Process Is Fabulously Unpredictable:
[W]hen you’re trying to create in the context of a large group of people with a whole range of different expertise, people tend to want to gravitate to those attributes or characteristics of a product that you can measure easily. If you’re trying to relate to a group of very different people and you want to appear sociable and engaged and connected, it’s much easier to talk about something that you can measure with a number [..] that’s a comfortable and easy conversation.
Jony Ive—McKinsey Quarterly | 13 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI Will Save The World:
[T]he industry have actually created creative computers for the first time. Like we literally have software that can like create art and create music and create literature and create poetry, and possibly like create many other kinds of things […] There's lots of domains of human activity, human expression, where computers have been useless up until now, because they're just hyper literal. And all of a sudden, they're actually creative partners.
Marc Andreessen—a16z Podcast | 63 minutes
How AI Changes Everything:
We have a general-purpose technology, the first in a generation. Computers were a general-purpose technology. Maybe the internet was a general-purpose technology, then we're talking about electrification steam, but nothing has been adopted this quickly. Nothing has been quite this alien. Nothing has been this out of control of organizations and companies, and in the hands of individuals before. It's going to touch everything we do in ways good and ill.
Ethan Mollick—Infinite Loops | 53 minutes
Vision Pro, two weeks on:
[W]ith a feature phone, the internet was one icon on your telephone, whereas on a smartphone, the phone is one icon on your computer; the whole thing gets pulled inside out. That's sort of the AR/VR thesis that Apple has: Meta's Metaverse is one of the 20 icons on your device, one of many icons on your device. So you're not going into the Metaverse when you put this thing on; you're not going anywhere. You might open an app, just as you do on your phone, but that's all you're doing.
Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 44 minutes