People Spirits
Longform as Defiance ⓧ Tech's Performance Art ⓧ Intent *is* Code
👋 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 ⚡
Our technologies are ultimately not contrary to life, but are in fact an extension of life, enabling it to develop yet more options and possibilities at a faster rate. Increasing options and possibilities is also known as progress, so in the end, what the technium brings us humans is progress—Kevin Kelly
📚 Reading
Audiences Prove that Experts Are Dead Wrong:
People now view anything coming out of Silicon Valley and the technocracy with intense skepticism and resistance. The pushback gets more intense with each passing month. This resistance has already killed the virtual reality market (despite billions spent by Meta and Apple), and will soon impact many other tech services—especially those based on turning the public into scrolling-and-swiping chimpanzees.
Ted Gioia—The Honest Broker | 9 minutes
Preserving Sacredness:
Silicon Valley's power…emerged from the collective capacity to experience technology as sacred, as something that transcends mere utility to touch deeper human aspirations. However, when mythology meets market incentives, something shifts. The same framework…becomes a sophisticated performance art. In the attention economy, the appearance of innovation often yields better returns than innovation itself.
Tina He—Fakepixels | 10 minutes
Intent is the new source code:
Product managers and designers might gain influence because they can better communicate requirements to AI systems. Junior developers might advance faster by focusing on high-level problems instead of basic coding tasks…The traditional code review process will also change. Instead of discussing implementation details, teams will focus more on architectural decisions and whether the agents correctly interpreted requirements.
Greg Ceccarelli—Meditations on Tech | 4 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI hype vs reality:
Many of us have invoked that story to explain why technologies don't transform things as fast as you think they're going to. I have to say that my personal impression is that what we're actually seeing on AI is not that story…I wonder whether this time around we're not seeing instead something like a kind of rush to be part of the wave of the future before we're actually even sure that it really is the wave of the future.
Paul Krugman—FT | 43 minutes
Karpathy vs. McKinsey: The Truth About AI Agents (Software 3.0):
The intelligence of large language models feels so jagged. They are stochastic simulations of people. They're people spirits. If we're building software for this kind of interaction, for people spirits, we have to think from the ground up how we design our software…People spirits, or LLMs, just don't have the reliable execution…We need to think about software as a design problem from that perspective.
Nate B Jones—AI News & Strategy Daily | 12 minutes
OpenAI cofounder and Stripe's first engineer:
This is the story of how deep learning works: You can't control where you're going to go. You can control everything that goes in. You can put these metrics and these measurements and you can have the evaluations. Being able to gauge where you're at is almost as important as being able to make the forward progress. But if you get all those elements right, then you can do true magic.
Greg Brockman—Cheeky Pint | 32 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Seeing Like A Network
2️⃣ years ago—AI and The Burden of Knowledge
3️⃣ years ago—Strategy in an Age of Uncertainty