👋 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 feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
The Four Shifts: An Overview
During the past 1000 days everybody in the world has gone through a social, health, government, business, and personal crisis because of Covid, rapidly shifting economies and other changes. This has exposed the fault lines in society and business that existed before 2019 and new technology break throughs and work behaviors have created secondary and tertiary shocks and people are different. The future does not fit in the mindsets of the past.
The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past | 7 minutes
Sympathy for the Algorithm:
Originality means doing something that hasn’t been done previously, for example, creating a painting, composition, or newspaper commentary wholly unlike what has come before. Originality is distinct from creativity, which involves combining pre-existing elements in novel ways [..] Artists who trade on originality may have nothing to fear, assuming of course that viewers can distinguish original artwork from the rest.
Project Syndicate | 5 minutes
LLMs and Information Post-Scarcity:
First the internet reduced the marginal cost of distributing content to zero. Now AI is reducing the marginal cost of producing content to zero. Content has become like clay. LLMs can remix it, summarize it, elaborate on it, hallucinate it, combine it with other content, freely transform it between text, audio, image, and back again. It seems we have achieved a kind of information post-scarcity. A regime of radical overproduction. A content singularity.
Subconscious | 7 minutes
🎧 Listening
What People of 1923 Predicted About 2023:
Here we have two eras a hundred years apart, the 1920s and our decade now, and we are both witnessing a technological change to how we work and an obsession with efficiency, and we're predicting massive changes as a result. Which makes me wonder: why didn't things turn out the way they predicted in the 1920s? I don't know about you, but I'm not working a four-hour workday, despite living in the future.
Build for Tomorrow | minutes
Death of the Link:
[ChatGPT] kills the link. It abstracts the information from a source and, using statistical methods, assembles a coherent narrative that answers your questions. It is certainly an assault on the centricity of the link as a way to navigate information [..] The entire economy of the Internet as we understand it is built around the link; a link is how we measure online advertising; [..] a link is the reward that we get for creating information; that's where we get our audiences from.
People vs Algorithms | 40 minutes
Opportunities in AI:
I think that we are literally in the beginning phases of the third tech revolution here, and it's being driven by AI. I think that the number of use cases, you can keep going and you just keep generating them. And you know how people used to always say it's Uber, but for X? I would modify that and say, X is going to be what AI improves next. And then you can fill in the X's. The medical uses are pretty well known. The convenience uses are really well known.
Infinite Loops | 72 minutes
🤔 Musing
Three articles and three podcasts, and all touch on ‘AI’; most even directly.
It’s easy to pooh-pooh this as a frenzy of VCs flocking away from the Web3 implosion. Which it is, and, at the same time, it’s what happens when a sufficiently novel infrastructure becomes available with an easier-than-before user interface.
The genuinely fascinating bit is we’re all doing it: for laughs, to replace copy writers, or to deal with bureaucracy. And we’re doing it out in the open, sharing and learning collectively. That will make it stick, somehow.