Playful Inventions
Capabilities over solutions, you are an NPC (probably), and the beauty in exponential technology.
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff ⚡
The past is written, but the future is left for us to write. And we have powerful tools, openness, optimism, and the spirit of curiosity – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
Is necessity actually the mother of invention?
Solving problems implies some baseline that you’re trying to get to. Creating capabilities raises that baseline, often in ways unimaginable before they were created. It’s the difference between making people not-hungry and not-sick (which is important!) and giving people the capability to build things that do not yet exist at rock-bottom prices while having casual coffee with friends anywhere in the world?
Ben Reinhardt—Spectech Newsletter | 6 minutes
Why You Are Probably An NPC:
Your brain will always try to save time when forming beliefs — it’s what it does — but the best way to save time is not to take a shortcut to “truth,” it’s to take no route at all. So if you want to stop being an NPC, simply say “I don’t know” to all the matters that don’t concern you. And that will give you the time to not be an NPC on all the matters that do.
Gurwinder | 22 minutes
I, Exponential:
What makes exponential technology curves so beautiful to me is how improbable and human they are. They require an against-all-odds brew of ideas, breakthroughs, supply chains, incentives, demand signals, luck, setbacks, dead ends, visionaries, hucksters, managers, marketers, markets, research, commercialization, and je ne sais quoi to continue, yet they do.
Packy McCormick—Not Boring | 29 minutes
🎧 Listening
Unbundling ChatGPT:
There's a point at which you don't want to make the tool, you want to buy the tool. ChatGPT has that sort of question, which is there's a whole bunch of stuff that's theoretically you could ask it to do, but actually […] you want the GUI. You want options and buttons and sliders and switches, as opposed to a text file where you've saved what form did I use last time for this. It's almost as if it's too much of a blank canvas that allows anyone to come up with any idea that you want.
Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 25 minutes
Stephen Wolfram:
We've known forever that language has a syntactic grammar, where nouns and verbs go together in particular ways. But what ChatGPT is showing us is that language has a higher level semantic grammar that says what allows one to put sentences together in a meaningful way. So it's putting together those puzzle pieces of meaning so that you get kind of reasonable sentences.
N N Taleb's Probability Moocs | 137 minutes
Complexity, Agency, and Information:
[T]here is a shared very particular characteristic of all complex systems, and that is that they internally encode the world in which they live. And whether that's a computer or a genome in a microbe or neurons in a brain, that's the coherent common denominator, not self-organizing patterns that you might find, for example, in a hurricane or a vortex. Those are very important elements, but they're not sufficient.
David Krakauer—Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 93 minutes