New Avenues
A year of New Avenues, Paths to AI Revelation, and Day 2
👋 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 attention harvesters and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
A Year of New Avenues:
It’s plain that neither the big tech companies nor the startup financiers are going to produce the “ways of relating” that will matter in the next decade. Almost by definition, any experiment that’s truly pathbreaking and provocative is too weird and tiny for them to suffer. They are trapped in their stupendous scale; lucky us.
Robin Sloan | 15 minutes
Four Paths to the Revelation:
One problem with AI is its tendency to hallucinate, making up fake facts that seem entirely justified. This is a problem if you are not an expert in the field the AI is addressing, but it also means that the AI is capable of tremendous world-building. You can work together to go as deep into a world as you would like.
Ethan Mollick—One Useful Thing | 9 minutes
Is it "Day 2" at Amazon???
I believe Jeff Bezos's greatest fear for Amazon was that it becomes a bureaucracy. A place where people become more concerned about optics than building great services and delivering great experiences for customers. A place where it becomes too hard for good teams and leaders to get the right things done. A place that slows down and becomes bloated.
John Rossman—The Digital Leader Newsletter | 14 minutes
🎧 Listening
Why Technology Still Matters:
[I]t's too slow, it doesn't scale, it's too expensive, it's too confusing, it doesn't work with existing systems, it's got a cold start problem. You've got this list of reasons why these new things can't work [..] That list of rational reasons why something can't work is also the same list of technology and business opportunities with that technology; it's the punch list of all the things for founders to do.
Marc Andreessen—a16z | 91 minutes
Going All-In on the Tech/Media War:
We probably all lived in a bit of a bubble where we just thought, well, we can trust anybody who's an expert, right? [..] I think we've started to get back to where we should have always been, which is, the search for truth is elusive. And you should take a multi-pronged approach to figuring out what the truth is and what the truth is for you. So your truth might be different than mine.
Jason Calacanis—Dead Cat | 60 minutes
Why I Left Twitter:
My topline argument about the world of work is these new technologies accidentally made us not only much stupider in the literal sense but are a drag on economic growth and productivity. Whereas in the world of our personal lives, issues of behavioural addiction become more prevalent [..] The consequence of what happens when we consolidate the Internet to a small number of privately controlled platforms and play the game of how do we maximise engagement.
Cal Newport—Making Sense Podcast | 69 minutes