👋 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
I Say This Unironically: Our Society Is Not Prepared For This Much Awesome:
Everyone knows that as of just a few short months ago, the written work products that form the foundation of our education system are now not reflecting the student capabilities, learning, and talents they were thought to be reflecting prior to ChatGPT. But what most do not yet know is that these tools have the ability to dramatically improve the educational experience for both instructors and students.
Jon Stokes | 11 minutes
Let’s (Not) Make Bots In Our Own Image:
I just want to help people create better, more human organisational operating systems to address the challenges of the C21st, whilst creating less alienating jobs for human beans. So, whilst the thrill of chatbots pretending to have existential crises is funny, it risks diverting attention away from the many, simple, practical things we can do with AI, ML and automation today to advance towards that goal.
Lee Bryant—LinkLog by PostShift | 7 minutes
Google's chatbot panic:
Google's chatbot strategy shouldn't be adding more madlibs to the internet – rather, they should be figuring out how to exclude (or, at a minimum, fact-check) the confident nonsense of the spammers and SEO creeps [..] And yet, Google is going all-in on chatbots, [..] Why on earth is the company racing Microsoft to see who can be first to leap off the peak of inflated expectations?
Cory Doctorow—Pluralistic | 7 minutes
🎧 Listening
The new media interface:
This type of [AI] automation, which essentially is what it is, is very expensive relative to the search query. That's going to come down, and we will solve that, make better chips, and bring the processing cost down. But it's going to force people to add services around search that cost money, and you either get that money back by building more transactions into that—in other words, some type of affiliate relationship—or you're actually going to do what OpenAI is trying to do: [..] attempt to charge the consumer for that.
Troy Young—People vs Algorithms | 42 minutes
The 1000x Developer:
The glue code plumber-type developer we have today will go away. Platforms are going to be a lot more expressive; they're able to be programmed using natural language and are building better abstractions [..] The front-end engineer is going to get way, way more powerful and will be able to build full-stack products just because they have access to all of these really powerful platforms [..] And back-end platform engineering: these people are going to be much more powerful [..] You're going to make them 100x, 1000x more productive.
Amjad Masad—The a16z Podcast | 59 minutes
Bing Breaks Bad, Metaverse Fades, Tesla's Self-Driving Recall
[I] love technology and innovation [..], and I do think this is exactly where taking a critical lens to it and trying to build a better way and a better system is important. Even on advertising [..] This is a great opportunity to rethink advertising [..] Maybe there will be an incredibly creative new add business model, the same way Google revolutionised search advertising. Rather than just display ads Yahoo plastered everywhere, they created an entirely new model that was good for a long time.
Ranjan Roy—Big Technology Podcast | 50 minutes
🏘️ Next Door
In Scenius Mag this week, we collected stories of the internet as essentially a living, constantly evolving organism, an ever-expanding collection of psychographic networks that reflects how we-humans go about meeting our needs. And it shows up everywhere.