Sentient
Remote First, Uncertainty, and the "Sentient" Trick
👋 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. Every week: no fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🏴☠️ Remote first, Async second:
Many makers work inside offices. But most offices hinder makers’ productivity. How could they not? The office as we know it is the physical embodiment of the manager’s schedule. It is a place for observing, instructing, receiving updates, and providing feedback. An office is a management tool. And offices work as intended. They empower managers. But they handicap makers.
5-minute read by Dror Poleg
🔮 Strategy in an Age of Uncertainty:
[A]lthough we may call for innovation, transformation, and change, most people back down at even the hint of risk, falling into a series of behavioral traps that limit organizations’ ability to grow and adapt. The challenge is that all growth, change, and transformation inevitably come paired with uncertainty. We have to go through the uncertainty to get to the possibility.
6-minute read by Nathan Furr in Harvard Business Review
🐶 One Weird Trick To Make Humans Think An AI Is “Sentient”:
[T]hese lines aren’t proceeding from any actual consciousness. Large-scale language models are just superpowered versions of the autocomplete that Gmail uses to predict the likely end of a sentence you’re typing. The bot was taking the conversational prompts that Lemoine was putting down and feeding back mathematically suitable responses, based on the gazillions of words of human text it had trained on.
7-minute read by Clive Thompson
🎧 Listening
🕵️♀️ Spotting Talent in the Modern Economy:
For many creative jobs, it’s extremely important to have a sense of, how well does the person radiate energy? And how long will they stick at things? And how do they approach social situations and try to get other people to cooperate with them? [..] If you ask people directly, you get lies or stilted or prepared answers. You want to just get people talking conversationally about anything they’re passionate about and just bring out, what’s their command of detail?
20 minutes with Tyler Cowen on AEI
👯♀️ There’s room for us and Amazon:
For every problem set an entrepreneur has, if they are on Shopify they are getting the product, they are getting the pricing, and they are getting the advantage of being part of this network--which is the second largest retailer. At the same time, they have an independent business: we are not renting customers to these merchants; their customers belong to them. If they were to leave Shopify, they leave with their customers; we don't own their business.
42 minutes with Shopify's Harley Finkelstein on Danny in the Valley
🦹♂️ Nothing More Than a Magic Trick:
It's not exactly fake. It's not quite the right word, but it is Meaningless. So it is, in a literal technical linguistics sense [..] It's really just like: "Okay, I have a bunch of statistics of words, and I'm gonna find the nearest thing." I think systems like this can have this kind of flavour. Like they know what they're talking about. It's just they don't, and they are just borrowing kind of cliches from humans. And they've all kinds of problems as a result.
65 minutes with Gary Marcus on Newcomer
🎁 One More Thing
This week marks the second anniversary of our round-up of remarkable stories. Whether as a subscriber or casual passer-by: thank you for being part of this all 🥂
📬 Suggestions?
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