Strategic Surprise Dept.
It _is_ Artificial Intelligence ⓧ Techno-Pragmatisme ⓧ Wringing out GPT-4
👋 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. All they have is secrecy and fear. And fear is the great destroyer — Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
It’s OK to call it Artificial Intelligence:
Where this gets actively harmful is when people start to deploy systems under the assumption that these tools really are trustworthy, intelligent systems—capable of making decisions that have a real impact on people’s lives. This is the thing we have to fight back against: we need to help people overcome their science fiction priors, understand exactly what modern AI systems are capable of, how they can be used responsibly and what their limitations are.
Simon Willison | 9 minutes
The Techno-Pragmatist Manifesto:
Techno-pragmatism is accepting that the future is not predetermined. That we have the power to decide among many potential futures and the responsibility to make that choice based on reason and evidence, respecting the plurality of interests of all our fellow humans and being thoughtful about our planet and future generations […] Some possibilities are objectively better than others, and it takes significant effort to find them.
Alejandro Piad Morfis—Mostly Harmless Ideas | 6 minutes
Signs and Portents:
I believe that we have 5-10 years of just figuring out what GPT-4 (and the soon-to-be-released Gemini Ultra) can do, even if AI development stopped today. There are so many real-world tasks that are at least somewhat tractable by the current set of GPT-4 class LLMs with the right processes and tools […] Most likely, AI development is actually going to accelerate for a while yet before it eventually slows down due to technical or economic or legal limits.
Ethan Mollick—One Useful Thing | 13 minutes
🎧 Listening
Building a Department of Strategic Surprise:
If you really want to do something hard, go find someone who's already done something like it and learn from them. And nature has been a three billion year R& D experiment in glorious solar powered, regenerative life and information. And every cell in your body has a spare copy of you in the form of DNA. Life choose promiscuous peer to peer replication […] Layered complexity is a design pattern in nature.
Mickey McManus—NTT | 39 minutes
The Future According to Steven Sinofsky:
One of the big challenges today that everyone faces is that for just about everything you can introduce, there's like an alternative. And in fact, the alternative is to just not do anything […] The alternative to buying a new computer was to not buy a new computer. And your world would be no worse off. I […] Apple Watch launches, and everybody immediately is like, well, I have a phone. And so right away, you're up against this.
Steven Sinofsky—Boz to the Future | 58 minutes
New Year, New Optimism:
I think the danger is that this becomes another insider's game. I'm not super worried about News Corp or the New York Times; they're politically connected […] But I think for the individual, when we talk about quote-unquote creators and just smaller businesses […] it becomes an insider's game. It rewards disproportionately those who have the ear of regulators and politicians. That's just how these systems work.
Brian Morrissey—People vs Algorithms | 72 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—Sympathy for the Algorithm
2️⃣ years ago—Entrepreneur: 1 — Manager: 0?
3️⃣ years ago—Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor