👋 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 two 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
Is the golden era of the (software) engineer over?
Most of the technical people you are hiring are your “programming language feeders”. These are people who take the logic from you. They do not determine the logic. And they will translate it into a language that the computer understands. AI can naturally do that, which is why non-technical people who get exposed to the coding abilities of an LLM get so super excited. You know, like, “oh, I have found my technical co-founder”.
Rohin Dharmakumar—The Ken | 5 minutes
The division between systems which can be fully digitized and those that cannot gets even more intense with AI. This puts even more pressure (and creates more value) at the efficient interface of the digital and the physical world […] It is 100% about new ways to reduce and capture reality into digital frameworks the machines can efficiently chew on
Sam Lessin—X | 3 minutes
Predictions for the Workplace of 2025, Revisited:
In 2024, […] collaborative ways of working, fueled by an ability to be connected to anyone from anywhere, have turned out to be entirely feasible — but not exactly as I had pictured. There are indeed highly skilled freelancers who base their work lives around platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr. But for many workers, independent gig work is an unregulated, low-wage solution where the platforms they use take a significant portion of the value they create.
Lynda Gratton—MIT Sloan | 10 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Venture Capital Reset Era:
One of the ways that we have been talking about our thesis is “AI but not on the nose”. What we mean by that is that there are going to be a bunch of businesses that can be built […] where this technology enables either a dramatic reduction in the labor needs of a business or radically expand what's possible with a way smaller labor footprint and therefore make the business much more capital efficient or enable a new kind of creativity.
Dave Morin—More or Less | 63 minutes
Predictions on Emerging Technologies, AI, and the Future of VC:
The one thing that I think is interesting, and I think this is not non consensus: all AI over the past few years has been basically two dimensional. So text video image, right? And now it's jumping into three dimensional world […] it's jumping out of the two dimensional space of code into the three dimensional space of actually producing protein in this case.
Josh Wolfe—The Logan Bartlett Show | 114 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Is necessity actually the mother of invention?
2️⃣ years ago— Non-Coercive Marketing: A Manifesto
3️⃣ years ago—The Other Invisible Hand