👋 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⚡️
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
📚 Reading
How we can teach children so they survive AI – and cope with whatever comes next:
Metacognition means thinking about thinking […] Schoolchildren should be taught to understand how thinking works, from neuroscience to cultural conditioning; how to observe and interrogate their thought processes; and how and why they might become vulnerable to disinformation and exploitation. Self-awareness could turn out to be the most important topic of all.
George Monbiot—The Guardian | 6 minutes
AI & Internet’s Existential Crisis:
Video, animation, and images — the relentless march of “AI” generated content is here. And you and I will find ourselves swimming in misinformation or the cheap fake equivalent of information. Soon, there will be so much of everything that we won’t have enough attention for anything […] Where does fresh content come from in the future? Will we even be incentivized to create something new?
Om Malik | 4 minutes
The workers at the frontlines of the AI revolution:
[F]uture-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers […] As generative AI tools present a new model for cost cutting, pressure is quickly mounting for these outsourced workers to adapt or risk losing work.
Andrew Deck—Rest of World | 29 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI & Information Integrity:
I can't think of a more kind of profound technology, exponential technology that's going to change the entire framework of society. But to start regulating it well, I guess we need to start breaking it down into its constituent parts. And that's so difficult because A, it's still nascent. We don't understand the full capabilities of the technology. And B, because of the exponential acceleration and adoption.
Nina Schick—Making Sense | 50 minutes
Threads vs Twitter, Zuck vs Elon, and Silicon Valley’s Civil War:
I think we are going from a world of monolithic billion plus users […] but that's just gonna kind of be the ABC, NBC, CBS type thing. And now we're gonna have cable television […] you end up with a bunch of 10 million person social networks […] And that's okay, you have this whole archipelago version of the internet, which is obviously how the web works. And I think people are gonna be less obsessed with the one platform where they wanna go accrue status.
Dan Romero—Moment of Zen | 70 minutes
A Fiery, But Mostly Peaceful Conversation About The Media:
[A] lot of people bet wrong on what this digital media space was going to look like. And actually the reason it changed was that […] Spotify and Netflix trained a generation of people who had not paid for content, something you could on your phone, and were doing it every month. Pay for content, and the rest of us little minnows in the media space, which is news, could stream along behind them.
Ben Smith—Pirate Wires | 55 minutes