Paradoxes
Horseless intelligence ⓧ Breaking "Disruption" ⓧ The oh-so-strange AI-enabled firm
👋 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
Horseless intelligence:
I’m more concerned with Dickens-style harms: people losing jobs not because AI can do their work, but because people in charge will think AI can do other people’s work. Harms due to people misunderstanding what AI does and doesn’t do well and misusing it […] The balance will depend on how well we collectively use it and educate each other, and how well we pay attention to what is happening.
Ned Batchelder | 5 minutes
We Need To Break The Disruption Mindset:
The dumbest thing anybody ever said about change is that you want to start by creating a sense of urgency. If the change is truly urgent then everyone already know it. The reason why so many change leaders cling to this “burning platform” mentality is because it ennobles the change leader, not the change itself.
Greg Satell—Digital Tonto | 6 minutes
Where We Are Headed:
Firms (and other organizations) […] will probably be heavier at the top than they are today, and so conceivably far more variable.We describe firms as persons for legal purposes, but they really might start to feel alive, almost biological in their ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Over the next decade, a new kind of life form will emerge on the world stage: the AI-enabled firm.
Dean W. Ball—Hyperdimensional | 16 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Beginning of the End of Explicit Programming:
In traditional software […] every pathway would be known, interactions would be defined, all of the outcomes would be mapped out. In an agent-based system we have to optimize for adaptability and flexibility; you want to optimize for moving intelligence from the human layer down to the agent layer. We are not going to predict every interaction in that; we’re have to be able to build system that can handle emergence, and that’s a really profound shift.
Nate B Jones—AI News & Strategy Daily | 9 minutes
The Architect's Paradox: Embracing Uncertainty in Software Architecture:
Since computers got powerful enough to start being used in complex human systems like large businesses […] our approach has always been to force our stakeholders […] just tell us requirements […] If you describe your world in a way that follows the laws of our world, then we can make your computer work for you […] But no one has ever raised the question before, hey, is it the way we think? Is it the way we think that's the problem?
Barry O'Reilly—Tech Lead Journal | 61 minutes
Why Elon Musk May Be Pulling Back from Washington:
Having waded through the kings in Shakespeare, the histories, the tragedies, the comedies: it all prepares you for this moment of a character, the likes of which we really haven't seen, certainly in American politics, but in living memory, just an extraordinary character and the people around him and what they're doing and how naked their lust for power is, their giddiness around power, their greed for attention. It's just an extraordinary moment.
Joanna Coles—More or Less | 54 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Why reliable AI requires a paradigm shift
2️⃣ years ago—How to be a hands-on citizen
3️⃣ years ago—Success and Failure at Pebble