We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson
👋 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⚡️
📚 Reading
Render Unto the Machine:
The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies […] modern institutions and technologies have been schooling people toward their own future obsolescence.
L.M. Sacasas—The Convivial Society | 10 minutes
AI, Ozymandias:
The broader question is whether anything but an organic brain can think like an organic brain does. Our continuing ignorance regarding even basic questions of cognition hampers this debate. Sometimes this ignorance is leveraged against strong AI claims, but sometimes in favor; we can’t really be sure that machine learning systems don’t think the same way as human minds because we don’t know how human minds think.
Freddie deBoer | 36 minutes
The LLMentalist Effect:
LLMs look less like an information technology and more like a modern mechanisation of the psychic hotline. Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice. Imagine Google or a major tech company trying to fix their search engine by adding a psychic hotline to their front page? That’s what they’re doing with Bard.
Baldur Bjarnason—Out of the Software Crisis | 24 minutes
🎧 Listening
Twilight of the Open Web:
Everybody could make things. There were bloggers, there were influencers, lots of new media companies [...] And then people said, I just go out and get subscribers, so we're going to put our energy towards putting up walls, blocking people. This includes now preventing AI from coming in, and we're putting walls around everything. So it's almost like kind of AOL now: you got to knock before you come in.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 58 minutes
A.I. Lies
The way I would think about LLMs from a founder opportunity is not as a chatbot, and more as a translation layer. You can translate between any two languages, and I define language very broadly. It could be from a textbook language to a seventh-grade comprehension level language. It could be translating from unstructured text to a user interface [...] translating things into the language that makes the most sense for the user [...]
John Luttig—Pirate Wires | 23 minutes
Gödel, Escher, Bach on the state of AI today:
It's when the symbols in that [computational] system are tracking something in the real world, when they parallel something in the real world so exactly that you can say that they stand for those things [...] when words are very systematically correlated with phenomena, in a very coherent, consistent way, over a long time, you come to believe that those words or those symbols really can be said to have meaning.
Doug Hofstadter—Game Thinking TV | 38 minutes