👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this and last 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
There Is No A.I.
The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature [..] Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.
Jaron Lanier—The New Yorker | 18 minutes
Against Safetyism:
[S]afetyism is often creating invisible or hidden risks that are far more consequential or impactful than the risks it attempts to mitigate. In a way, this makes sense: creating a new technology and deploying it widely entails a definite vision for the future. But a focus on the risks means a definite vision of the past, and a more stochastic model of what the future might hold.
Byrne Hobart, Tobias Huber—Pirate Wires | 12 minutes
Augmented Media:
Arguably, the biggest impact of AI on media date has not been around the content itself, but how it’s fed to us. Social media, broadly considered, represented not just a layer on content, but an entirely new interface to it. The personalization of content delivery via algorithms inside of Facebook’s feed was media’s first AI use case [..] AI chat is the potential end game of aggregation, deconstructing content at a semantic level, an existential problem for content creators.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 8 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI doctors:
By doing mRNA vaccines, the hope is [..] you get to market a lot faster. Remember how fast these COVID vaccines came out? And now imagine them being designed with this type of Generative AI technology that understands the language of RNA. So you can get them out really fast and hopefully have great efficacy. But also, it's just a different paradigm [..] It sounds like science fiction, but I don't think we're far off [..]
Vijay Pande—Danny in the Valley | 52 minutes
Exploration As a Service, Creator Value, AI/ChatGPT:
When you subscribe to someone, I give you access to my inbox. And so I'm giving you access to what I will think about in the future. That's powerful [..] And so I'm trying to build the implicit trust that I know you enough, and the stuff you find interesting is what I find interesting. So, you have permission to send me stuff. That's sacred, in a way. That's very powerful. But you can't get there if you're trying to be bland and sound like everybody else.
LibertyRPF—The Fort | 61 minutes
On Self-Delusion, Sancho Panza, Safe Words & Seinfeld:
The thing that is so interesting about the topic of self-deception is that it is basically never single-player. There are always other people around you who are complicit in this thing, and that's an essential part of why it works. And again, to the point of Don Quixote of La Mancha, is it in fact heroic to support the delusions of others and prevent them from crashing down? The answer is, quite possibly.
Alex Danco—Infinite Loops | 48 minutes
🤔 Musing
Last week’s edition did not get past the cutting floor because the budget was entirely spent on digesting, discussing, and workshopping “A.I.” More than any other wave of general-purpose-ish technology I surfed before, all of these activities ended up in deconstructing the myths we constructed, in removing the powers (for good and for not-so-good) we attributed to “A.I”. Best summed up like this:
[T]he way we refer to these technologies we casually grant them permission to be "alive" if only in our imagination. AI is more about psychology and philosophy than technology. In this way we must approach it very differently than we are currently.
John Mulholland—LinkedIn