đ On time for your weekend: a round-up of this weekâs remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this weekâs relentless algorithmic chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuffâĄď¸
đ Reading
Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist:
At its core the technium is an ecosystem of inventions capable of evolving entirely new forms of being that wet biology alone can not reach. Our technologies are ultimately not contrary to life, but are in fact an extension of life, enabling it to develop yet more options and possibilities at a faster rate. Increasing options and possibilities is also known as progress, so in the end, what the technium brings us humans is progress.
Noahpinion | 37 minutes
Googleâs evolution from âdonât be evilâ to âwin at all costsâ:
[W]e should look at how we advance an open internet on a fair, level and competitive playing field for everyone with better incentives. Bad incentives created the financial crisis just over a decade ago. Letâs not repeat history and create an anemic internet built around a few too-big-to-fail companies. Letâs fix incentives to ensure no company, including Google, acts as the judge, jury, defense, court reporter, and prosecution for digital advertising transactions.
Jeff GreenâThe Current | 8 minutes
Why Bank Runs Happenâand What We Can Do to Stop the Panic:
If Tesla vehicles already contain a technology as cool as regenerative braking, then Iâm confident we can find a way to put some form of braking mechanism on our social media platforms in order to slow the spread of dangerous contagion until people have had a chance to cool their heads and more objectively evaluate whatâs going on. This weekend it was a bank run. Tomorrow, it might be panic over the threat of a nuclear strike.
Luke BurgisâThe Free Press | 11 minutes
đ§ Listening
The Trouble with AI:
Something that's really struck me in the last month is there's a reminder of how much we're at the mercy of big tech companies. My personal opinion is we're not very close to artificial general intelligence, and I continue to think we're not very close to artificial general intelligence. With whatever it is that we have right nowâthis kind of approximate intelligence, this mimicry that we have right nowâthe lessons of the last months or two are we don't really know how to control even that.
Gary MarcusâMaking Sense Podcast | 84 minutes
Dude, you broke the Future!
Looking in particular at the history of the past two to four hundred years, that age of rapidly increasing change, one glaringly obvious deviation from the preceding 3000 centuries is obvious, and that's the development of [..] the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations. What lessons from the history of a company can we draw that tell us about the likely behaviour of the type of artificial intelligence we're interested in here today?
Charles Strossâ34C3: TUWAT | 58 minutes
AI APIs:
Everyone thinking about [AI] thinks they are confused and do not quite have a good coherent understanding of what this is, what it means, and what it turns into. That's right down from the technical level of exactly what is it that LLMs are doing, what are the things that don't work, and how feasible is it to fix. There are also questions like: [..] is generalised search a good use case for this, or are all the vertical applications actually the place where most of this becomes most useful?
Benedict EvansâBig Technology Podcast | 63 minutes
đď¸ Next Door
Scenius Mag this week collects a few stories on both the challenge and need of human-ness and human collaboration in the age of AI.