👋 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
Taking Risk:
A thriving tech ecosystem is a virtuous cycle - there’s a flywheel effect that takes several revolutions to get up-to-speed […] The founders get rich and become venture capital investors. The early employees start their own companies or become angel investors. Later employees learn how to scale up these businesses and use their expertise to become the executives of the next wave of successful growth-stage startups.
Tom Blomfield | 10 minutes
Will AI do to expert professions what the Model T did to railroads?
What AI does that previous generations of computers could not do is to respond in novel, not pre-programmed ways to stimuli. This opens up the opportunity that people with less training and lower skills are able to produce the outputs (in many cases, choices or decisions) that would have previously required extensive training and field practice […] With answers to key factual questions available at the push of a button, that form of expertise is likely to become far less pricey.
Rita McGrath—Thought Sparks | 7 minutes
A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle:
Leaders in the field of this new development — specifically leaders, like lab administrators, corporate executives, and so on, as opposed to practitioners like engineers and scientists — recognize the sales potential of referring to this newly-“thinking” machine as “Artificial Intelligence”, often speculating about science-fictional levels of societal upheaval (specifically in a period of 5-20 years), now that the “hard problem” of machine cognition has been solved.
Glyph | 6 minutes
🎧 Listening
Move Fast (But Don't) Break Silicon Valley:
The job of technologists is not to just simply read science fiction and say, "Well, that's cool. Let's build that." That's easy. […] That's the 101 at best. The 201, the 301, the real place money and magic is made is when you know that exact inflection point where you cross the lines and the tech actually is ready to happen and be possible intersected with the ideas […] When is the technology ready to intersect with delivery?
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 61 minutes
AI Time Machine:
I think there's still going to be the same kind of mechanics of search engine optimization, which I guess becomes more of a chat optimization. Links are still the same, some people call them citations, maybe they're more compressed, so there are only the top result gets traffic. But I still think that the kind of output of these kind of platforms and discovery engines and knowledge engines like Google will still lead to traffic for publishers.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 69 minutes
OpenAI and Google Race to "Her" - Is the Big Tech Singularity Near?
Let us track all these logistics and all this paperwork and all this stuff that's expensive to us, where humans effectively can only do so many things, even though the amount of actual stuff going on inside those things is often very small. AI can solve a lot of these problems for us, but we have to want it to, we have to care about that, and it has to be the thing we prioritize.
Zvi Mowshowitz—Cognitive Revolution | 122 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—BCIs and the ecosystem of modular minds
2️⃣ years ago—Tech Leaders Can Do More to Avoid Unintended Consequences
3️⃣ years ago—We need a career path for invention