Private Intelligence
The job automation myth ⓧ The future of UI ⓧ You deserve a Private Intelligence
👋 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 ⚡
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
I find the story of AI and radiology fascinating:
If you define jobs in terms of tasks maybe you're actually defining away the most nuanced and hardest-to-automate aspects of jobs, which are at the boundaries between tasks…it is irrelevant how good AI gets at task-based capability benchmarks. If you need to specify things precisely enough to be amenable to benchmarking, you will necessarily miss the fact that the lack of precise specification is often what makes jobs messy and complex in the first place.
Arvind Narayanan—X | 2 minutes
Thoughts about the future of UI:
Personal agents will win over dedicated app agents. People are getting used to agentic experiences, so building a dedicated agent for your app may seem like a good idea, but this is just a "faster horses" solution. No one will browse to 4 different websites to use 4 different agents. They'll use their own single agent and won't care how your websites even look.
Liad Yosef—X | 2 minutes
Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future:
Every person deserves a Private Intelligence that works only for them, with no ulterior motives or conflicts of interest. Your AI should be like having your own personal cloud—as private as running software on your own device, but with the convenience of the cloud. This doesn’t mean everyone needs their own AI model—we can share the computational infrastructure while keeping our personal contexts sovereign and portable.
Alex Komoroske—Techdirt | 5 minutes
🎧 Listening
Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era
We know that creativity as a human component of our purpose can't be optimized. It's not something that we can do in a fast way…And so in this age of hyperscaling around AI, how do we stop and reflect and give real space for creativity? Honoring creativity is really about reclaiming our agency. When we stop and we get a chance to reflect and honor our creativity, we actually start to deepen our purpose as humans.
Kim Carson—Long Now | 47 minutes
The Role of the Human Brain in Programming:
Tools are better than agents in almost every scenario. And when there's a scenario where you feel like you want to delegate to an agent, that's because you don't have a good enough tool. And we should build that tool. And we could use AI to build that tool. We should not build you an agent…Tools address a human need by amplifying human capabilities. And there's a part that fits the need, the problem, and there's a part that fits the human.
Steve Krouse—Val Town | 35 minutes: 7:10
The Future of Venture Capital:
The big winners in tech more and more are companies that go directly into an incumbent industry…Uber in 2000 would have been specialist software for taxi dispatch that you sell to taxi cab operators…Airbnb in 2000 would have been booking software for bed and breakfasts, running on a Windows PC…The company is delivering the entire promise of the technology all the way through to the actual customer. Which is basically quicker to get there.
Marc Andreessen—Uncapped | 100 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
2️⃣ years ago—The Creative Process Is Fabulously Unpredictable
3️⃣ years ago—The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class