👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history:
[A]ll these new AI developments pose a great conundrum. We don’t know how to respond psychologically, or for that matter substantively. And just about all of the responses I am seeing I interpret as “copes,” whether from the optimists, the pessimists, or the extreme pessimists. No matter how positive or negative the overall calculus of cost and benefit, AI is very likely to overturn most of our apple carts, most of all for the so-called chattering classes.
Tyler Cowen—Marginal Revolution | 7 minutes
Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment:
The current generation of AI models are a missile aimed, however unintentionally, directly at software production itself. Sure, chat AIs can perform swimmingly at producing undergraduate essays, or spinning up marketing materials and blog posts (like we need more of either), but such technologies are terrific to the point of dark magic at producing, debugging, and accelerating software production quickly and almost costlessly.
Paul Kedrosky & Eric Norlin—SK Ventures | 20 minutes
Cheating is All You Need:
If you can build something as big as Amazon Web Services with a stack based on a simple service call, or whole social networks and customer service suites based on simple browser-to-browser communication, or a robust way of delivering and managing software based on a little process isolation code, then just imagine how big a thing you could build – bear with me here – if you had the goddamn Singularity as your starting point?
Steve Yegge | 18 minutes
🎧 Listening
The future of (almost) everything:
It's 1991, you work at MIT Media Lab, and you notice that 10s of million people have a PC now, and they are all going to be connected to networks [..] You get a whiteboard, and you write everything you can image that might happen, and then you draw a box around it and call it 'The Information Superhighway.' And who will build this? The New York Times, and Bertelsmann, and Disney, and AT&T. And here we are 25 years later, and we are all kind of doing all of that [..] but not like that and not from those companies.
Benedict Evans—Recode Media (Apple, Spotify) | 64 minutes
Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and The Invention of The Self
This increasingly rational approach to nature produces a certain distance to nature because nature has become this thing that has to be observed and understood from an objective perspective. That has erased the wonder and the awe of nature; no matter how much scientists calculate, experiment, observe: there is an emotional and viceral, and maybe unexplainable connection between humanity and nature [..] Poeticise the sciences!
Andrea Wulf—Complexity Podcast | 66 minutes
GPT-4 is here, now what?
Base case is, this feels like iPhone moment, Web moment, Social network moment. Here is this big structural shift of the kind that happens every ten years. it's going to change so much of our habbits; it changes an awful lot of how tech works and what tech products you'll use. And there will be all sorts of stuff that's happening inside stuff you use with, and you don't know you're using this [..] This is the minimum base case.
Benedict Evans, Toni Cowan-Brown—Another Podcast | 39 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
We will join TheNTWK’s 2023 Summit, 18-19 May, in Barcelona and with our fav stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
It’s Europe’s top event for learning and networking on anything-digital and the perfect spot for hosting a Thoughtforms meet-up. If you like to join in, promo code RONSUM23
gets you a 30% discount.