👋 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⚡️
📚 Reading
AI Is a Lot of Work:
[T]he latest iteration of a particularly Silicon Valley division of labor, in which the futuristic gleam of new technologies hides a sprawling manufacturing apparatus and the people who make it run […] a digital version of the transition from craftsmen to industrial manufacturing: coherent processes broken into tasks and arrayed along assembly lines with some steps done by machines and some by humans but none resembling what came before.
Josh Dzieza—The Verge | 36 minutes
Hallucinations in AI:
In the short term, AI seems to be a sustaining innovation, not a disruptive one. But I think there are failures of imagination at the product ideation level: it is much easier to modify what’s already working than to think from scratch about what new opportunities exist […] there will be entirely new product form factors that won’t have the formula of incumbent software workflow + AI.
John Luttig—luttig’s learnings | 12 minutes
Large Language Models Are Small-Minded:
[S]tatistical inference is surely not the whole story of human cooperation, creativity, coordination, and competition. Have we become so mesmerized by Large Language Models that we do not see the rest of what we do in language? […] We build organizations and societies. We create traditions and histories. We take responsibility for actions. We build trust […] None of these is statistical. There is a great chasm between the capabilities of LLMs and those of human beings.
John Arquilla, Peter Denning—The National Interest | 6 minutes
🎧 Listening
The Possibilities of AI:
Instagram when Greylock funded it was 13 employees. So it's an amplification of the general software model where you can have very small teams that produce things that are Archimedean levers that move the world. Now you do need in all of those cases, massive compute infrastructure. So like AWS existed for Instagram and so forth. You need that in order to make it happen. But a small team of software people can, can create amazing things.
Reid Hoffman—Conversations with Tyler | 61 minutes
Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park:
[W]e're going to live with two very different ways of engaging with reality: a machine-based, high-dimensional, very precise, predictive framework that is a black box, and ours, which is a more familiar framework from the history of science, if you like, but that is faithful to the complexity of the systems we study, which doesn't predict so well, but does allow us to understand the basic mechanisms generating the phenomena of interest.
Michael Garfield, David Krakauer—Complexity Podcast | 100 minutes
Why Leadership Has Gone Wrong:
So this business of world creating, that's leadership. The business of getting quarterly report numbers, that's management. They're profoundly different things. I think we've become way too focused on getting the number right instead of getting the story straight […] throughout the course of human history, we've had two primary technologies for imposing order on chaos. One is numbers and the other is stories. Between the two, stories are much more powerful.
Dr. Pippa Malmgren—Infinite Loops | 73 minutes
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson