šĀ On time for your weekend: a round-up ofĀ this weekās remarkable storiesĀ at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ā”
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity āĀ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
š Reading
Everything Is Hackable:
A successful hack changes the system as it is repeatedly used and becomes popular. It changes how the system works, either because the system gets patched to prevent it or expands to encompass it. Hacking is a process by which those who use a system change it for the better, in response to new technology, new ideas, and new ways of looking at the world. This is hacking as evolution.
Bruce SchneierāSlate | 4 minutes
How Generative AI helped me imagine a better robot:
Co-designing with AI was an illuminating experience. A prompt can cover many attributes, including the subject, medium, environment, color, and even mood. A good prompt, I learned, needed to be specific because I wanted the design to serve a particular purpose. On the other hand, I wanted to be surprised by the results. I discovered that I needed to strike a balance between what I knew and wanted, and what I didnāt know or couldnāt imagine but might want.
Didem GĆ¼rdĆ¼r BrooāIEEE Spectrum | 13 minutes
Another three things:
Media fearmongers tend to assume that people only are ever seeking āthe truthā in consuming media, not entertainment or camaraderie or fantasy or any number of other gratifications. That is, they assume that there is only demand for information, and never demand for misinformationĀ [ā¦] But the demand for āfactsā is a highly elastic subset of the larger demand for content.
Rob HorningāInternal Exile | 10 minutes
š§ Listening
AGI and Institutional Disruption:
[P]eople have the this sort of prior that AI, even if it's near, will be rate limited by the real world because of all the complexity of implementation. But the point is, if you have things that can in context learn and perform sort of as humans perform, then you don't need to change the process. You can take human design processes and have the AI just fill in for the human. And so it leads to this paradox where we're probably going to have AGI before we get rid of the last fax machine.
Samuel HammondāFuture of Life Institute | 133 minutes
The "Factory System" Era of Venture is Dead:
I'm an early 80s kid; I did for sure see the internet story. And you kind of get addicted to there's going to be this thing that changes everything every 10 years. That's not what I think actually happens. I think the internet was a particularly big rip, and people are desperate to find the next internet level opportunity. Itās not mobile, thatās just internet, but more; and the value went to the internet companies. Like AI, it's just more internet, and it's going to go to those guys.
Sam LessināTurpentine VC | 67 minutes
Rethinking Digital Transformation:
You have to invest in [ā¦] the people because you've got to be attracting and retaining, which is frankly harder, the right kind of people. If you do all that, the leadership can retire or move on and things can change. It's not that you need to have the person who oversaw the kicking off of this process, to be there 10 years from now as you're pushing into the next iteration of what comes next, but you're going to have put in place that, as you put it, self-sustainable muscle.
David RogersāDavid Lancefield | 47 minutes