👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening—Marshall McLuhan
📚 Reading
AI isn’t replacing radiologists:
In many jobs, tasks are diverse, stakes are high, and demand is elastic. When this is the case, we should expect software to initially lead to more human work, not less … Models can lift productivity, but their implementation depends on behavior, institutions and incentives. For now, the paradox has held: the better the machines, the busier radiologists have become.
Deena Mousa—Works in Progress | 16 minutes
AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity:
[W]orkslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.
Kate Niederhoffer et al—HBR | 10 minutes
Vibing is not the way:
It’s time to drop the machine dreams. Start building human-centered first principles and practices around when and how to use AI. The bar is pretty low right now given all of the crap that’s out there, so it doesn’t have to take much at the moment. But it does require an honest start…building systems that amplify human intelligence instead of replacing it with passable-looking garbage that creates more work than it solves.
Greg Storey—Brilliantcrank | 4 minutes
🎧 Listening
Software Finally Eats Services:
The people that actually push the AI to do more, is this other new kind of psychographic, which is: who is willing to just be like “you know what? I’m going to YOLO this this task and just see what the AI comes up with.” Your willingness to just do that, I think probably shows up in the in the ultimate productivity gain.
Aaron Levie—a16z | 60 minutes
The $10B Capital War Reshaping Tech:
In a world of low trust and high fakes and AI and lack of transparency and might is right, , you either want to be the king of your world, you want to own a dominion. Or the other way to be powerful is to sit on a trade route and control it … There’s a trade route from New York finance to Silicon Valley tech, there is a Silicon Valley tech to Tel Aviv route, Riyadh to Silicon Valley is an absolutely establishing trade route.
Sam Lessin—More or Less | 47 minutes
Speeches and Spells for the Kings and Priests:
People rise in their careers until they reach a job title where a lie they tell themselves hits resonant frequency, at which point they catastrophically self-destruct without warning … People tell a story about themselves that dangerously gets amplified out of control because they often will have reached a level of seniority where they are now surrounded by people who cannot tell them that they are wrong.
Alex Danco—Infinite Loops | 81 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley
2️⃣ years ago—Who (And Where) Are Today’s Innovators?
3️⃣ years ago—The Great Progression