👋 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 ⚡
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 – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
Generative AI and intellectual property:
One way to think about this might be that AI makes practical at a massive scale things that were previously only possible on a small scale. This might be the difference between the police carrying wanted pictures in their pockets and the police putting face recognition cameras on every street corner - a difference in scale can be a difference in principle. What outcomes do we want? What do we want the law to be? What can it be?
Benedict Evans | 9 minutes
How to Prepare for a GenAI Future You Can’t Predict:
Here’s the paradox: We need to think of the workforce as evolving with — rather than being supplanted by — generative AI. The workforce will need to evolve, and workers will have to learn new skills, iteratively and over a period of years. […] which requires tracking key developments in AI differently […] and most importantly, creating evidence-backed future scenarios that challenge conventional thinking within the organization.
Amy Webb — Harvard Business Review | 13 minutes
AI and Leviathan:
AI is a microscope. It increases the information resolution of the universe […] AI turns your gait into a finger print, a microphone into a key logger, and a snapshot of your face into a > 93% accurate polygraph test […] While I think we will need new oversight mechanisms for deploying frontier models safely as their scale and power ramps up, our goal should not be to stop AI but rather to in some sense master it.
Samuel Hammond — Second Best | 11 minutes
🎧 Listening
Inside the VC brain:
The framework that I've always loved is [...] are you choosing to be a Jedi or a general? And there's this famous scene in Star Wars where Darth Vader just walks into the boardroom and joins the meeting. And to me, that's always been the image of venture capital in my mind, that the Jedi can just roll into the board room and join the meeting and put some opinions in. And the generals all just look at him like he has no idea what he's talking about.
Dave Morin—More Or Less | 51 minutes
Wartime vs Peacetime: Ben Horowitz on Leadership:
[C]ulture is not a set of beliefs; it's a set of actions. And when you talk about culture, that's where you have to start. Culture is all the behaviors that you have, how you treat each other […] and your culture ends up defining a lot more of how the organization works than your mission statement or your KPIs or any of that other stuff, because it's how you're behaving daily. Every micro decision that everybody makes is kind of a reflection of the culture.
The a16z Podcast | 35 minutes
Institutional Disruption:
When I look through history at the printing press or the Industrial Revolution, these technological regime changes precede institutional regime changes [...] Government work is like a fleshy API. And just like software is eating the world, software will eat the state. And anytime we've had these technology shifts, it's really shifted the balance of power between nation-states and society. And I think this one is no different.
Sam Hammond—Upstream with Erik Torenberg | 58 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
We are attending Intersection Conference, 17-19 September in Vienna. If you happen to be around and want to chat on anything post-digital or riff on The Current Thing™️, do get in touch. We’re happy to splash out on a beverage of your choice.