👋 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
Malleable software in the age of LLMs:
LLMs will represent a step change in tool support for end-user programming: the ability of normal people to fully harness the general power of computers without resorting to the complexity of normal programming. Until now, that vision has been bottlenecked on turning fuzzy informal intent into formal, executable code; now that bottleneck is rapidly opening up thanks to LLMs.
Geoffrey Litt | 22 minutes
The Music Matters More than the Instrument:
If I was creating powerful AI, I’d be consuming every artistic representation of its use that exists in books and movies to understand the why of it, to dream about the good and bad outcomes, and to help shape its course. It’s artists who can see where technology is going more so than the creators of the technology.
Brad Slingerlend—SITALWeek | 10 minutes
Unpredictable Black Boxes are Terrible Interfaces:
Generative AI black boxes are terrible interfaces because they do not provide users with a predictive conceptual model. It is unclear how the AI converts an input natural language prompt into the output result. Even the designers of the AI usually can’t explain how this conversion occurs in a way that would allow users to build a predictive conceptual model.
Maneesh Agrawala | 12 minutes
🎧 Listening
The End of Programming Is Nigh:
[T]hese large language models, like GPT3, they can actually act as general-purpose problem solvers. If you give a model a detailed problem to solve, it can break it down into steps and execute those steps one by one and call out to external system and APIs, and basically take action if you frame the problem the right way for the model [..] Let's take that as a new computational substrate; the model is the virtual machine, and you program it in English.
Matt Welsh—The New Stack | minutes
Reinventing Capitalism in the Digital Age:
Reinventing capitalism is the most important challenge of our time, and this is because human beings and the organizations we create favour our needs and preferences in the moment over those that will matter in the future. As a result, the needs of future generations are shortchanged, but even our own needs are not well-served with this automatic way of thinking, and it will take a concerted effort to reinvent capitalism so that it serves us.
Amy Edmondson—Steve Denning | 68 minutes
Reimagining workplaces:
The heart of bad work and dysfunction is really management, leadership, and all that stuff. So, the Nowhere Office, which has exposed the beams and the build of the way work works, is really very healthy even if it's quite painful in the short term because it forces everybody who is working to go: what makes this work [..] how are we using the technology, what does it feel like to come together meaningfully less at the time but to self-manage the rest. Is it working, is it not working?
Julia Hobsbawm—Lancefield on the Line | 36 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
We will host an Ecosystem Innovation Workshop, 16-17 May, in Barcelona as a run-up to the annual TheNTWK Summit.
It’s a different kind of workshop: no theory or expert lingo, elaborate tools or paper canvasses. All that’s needed is an appreciation of human interaction and collaboration to start seeing your ecosystem for what it truly is.
We don’t get to do public workshops all that much, and if the tone of this one resonates, you may want to consider signing up. Having a Thoughtforms meet-up then and there would be rather great, too ☺️