Magic.
Profiting off AI, Technological Windows, and a 3rd Magic
👋 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 feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
How to profit off AI:
[M]y main worry with AI is that people are too focused on the technology in isolation rather than seeing it as a platform, like electricity or the mobile phone, that will have much broader ramifications. To use some more econ jargon, humans tend to think in terms of the comparative statics, in which one thing changes while everything is held constant, rather than in terms of general equilibrium.
Samuel Hammond—Second Best | 16 minutes
The Shape of a Technological Window:
[B]reakthrough products are possible when there is a ‘technological window’ — that is, when a number of nascent technical innovations come together to allow you to create a product that is a ‘quantum leap’ forward [..] You can be too early to a technological window (in which case you pay a high price to push it open), or too late (in which case you lose out).
Cedric Chin—Commoncog | 22 minutes
The third magic:
Usually we think of innovations as specific technologies — agriculture, writing, the wheel, the steam engine, the computer [..] But I think that at a deeper level, there are more profound and fundamental meta-innovations that underlie even those things, and these are ways of learning about the world.
Noah Smith—Noah Pinion | 17 minutes
🎧 Listening
A New Way To Think:
The most important question [..] is not "what is true"; it's "what would have to be true." If you ask what is true, you learn what is now; you won't learn much about why what-is is; you just learn that it is, and that's not going to give you much of a leg up on creating something new. If your fundamental question is what would have to be true for X to happen, you can imagine X's out there that would be better than what you got now.
Roger Martin—Follow Your Different | 91 minutes
The Future of Our Work?
We write everywhere, but if you think about it [..]: when we write, it's the way a product manager from Microsoft decided in 1980. Whether we use Word, or Google Docs, or whatever it is, we are sort of writing in the same way. My prediction is that will change dramatically in the next three years and probably sooner than that [..] That will allow us to operate at a much higher level; to put forth our ideas, and the software will help us put them into words in the best way possible.
Yoav Shoham—Person Plus Machine | 66 minutes
O’Shaughnessy Ventures is Here:
I've also had the thesis that all of the old business models are collapsing and in their place are going to be new ones that are very, very different [..] the rules are changing everywhere. The way you set positive sum up is very different than the way traditional VCs have been set up [..] I think the new models are on their way and certain circumstances are here already, and we want to take what we view as the new playbook and run it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy—Infinite Loops | 65 minutes