👋 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
🤖 The Great Fiction of AI:
AI may just be another tool, but authors haven’t previously felt the need to remind themselves that they—and not their thesaurus—are responsible for their writing or have fraught debates over whether to disclose their use of spellcheck. Something about the experience of using AI feels different [..] Whatever the reason, AI writing has entered an uncanny valley between ordinary tool and autonomous storytelling machine.
25-minute read by Josh Dzieza in The Verge
♾ Never-Ending Story:
My son’s world, which is also the world of the students whom I teach, is a virtual one [They] have no trepidation about how it is they experience these multiple worlds. They do more than simply enjoy their forays; they seem to thrive there [..] Out of what I consider to be two distinct environs, they have made a multi-layered, vertiginously connected world. The screen and the classroom traverse, cross-cut, each other; one traffics in, informs, shapes, distends, challenges, the other.
12-minute read by Grant Farred in Real Life
⚛️ Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains:
If law, money, and government are the infrastructure of our civilization, then Atoms, Institutions, and Blockchains are some of the raw materials this infrastructure is built with [..] But the civilization we are trying to build is stretching the limits of what those materials can do. It is becoming increasingly obvious that Atoms and Institutions alone cannot support the global digital civilization we strive towards. This is the problem that blockchains solve.
29-minuted read by Josh Stark
🎧 Listening
🦑 When the point of leverage changes:
You got these narrowly focused businesses, doing things along the side that are naturally-adjacent to the stuff they know how to do. And that has been shifting for a little bit for a while, and part of this is about scale. When Apple launched the iPhone, revenue was about $20B and last year Apple's R&D budget was $20B. So you see them doing stuff they couldn't afford to in the past, like making their own chips, buying TV shows... How does what makes sense to do, change as you get bigger?
37 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
😾 Is Social Media Making Our Society Stupid?
The performative platforms, that's what we're talking about. We're not talking about the Internet, we're not talking about communications technology—communication is good. We're talking about a small number of platforms where people do the labour; they create the content in exchange for prestige. That's what's destroying a generation with issues of mental health, and that's what I think is most damaging to democracies.
57 minutes with Jonathan Haidt on Big Technology Podcast
👩⚖️ The state of the industry and the challenges of regulation:
The interesting problem is that in most industries, the entire nature of the industry doesn't change that often, whereas in tech it changes every ten years or so. Microsoft didn't do mainframes, Google didn't do PC operating systems, Facebook didn't do a search engine. Imagine having a competition conversation around Google or Facebook in 2005 [..] In tech, the big competitive thread comes from somebody changing the nature of the market.
45 minutes with Benedict Evans on Top in Tech
📬 Suggestions?
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