👋 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. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
You can't just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings:
[A]ny strategy that myopically focuses on canceling meetings from the top down without a more nuanced, holistic, and inclusive approach to what will replace them risks falling back into old, or even worse, habits. It’s easy to wipe meeting time off the calendar – it’s much harder to build up an async-first culture, system, and habits to replace it.
Becky Kane | 5 minutes
Prompt Windows:
The idea that technology is a form of irresistible magic returns. It can either fully manipulate populations so that they cannot resist its takeover of society, or its possibilities are so self-evidently beneficial that no one really would want to resist them, except for the class of professional nay-sayers, worry-worts, and others on the wrong side of history who have various vested interests in registering their complaints.
Internal Exile | 6 minutes
The Future:
[A]s we are still in thrall of longer term research institutions, which lay claim to 10,000 year old clocks and focus on finding centuries old research institutions, the future’s becoming even less predictable. If you had tried to make a future-proofed house a couple decades ago, you might have put in ethernet cables and copper wires, maybe even a television antennae. But it would’ve gotten obsolete in record time.
Strange Loop Canon | 14 minutes
🎧 Listening
Building for Tomorrow:
We fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability [..] We generally believe that we exist in a kind of balance, and that balance is very easily upset by new things. So when something new comes along, we tend to process it as a loss [..] We cannot imagine what the gain will be, or maybe don't believe there will be a gain, so we start to extrapolate the loss.
The a16z Podcast | 74 minutes
CES and AI Freakouts:
We have seen Google, in single moves, destroy entire categories of sites, like shopping sites, movie listings, weather... There are all kind of places where they have intervened with massive economic consequences, but now the pressure is real; everybody is freaking out about AI [..] Everybody—whether they content marketers or ad startups, affiliate publishers, or software companies—are putting time and energy into this immediately.
People vs Algorithms | 37 minutes
Tyler Cowen on AI and China:
That's already a trend with the internet: you can customize what you read now. You'll literally be able to design your own education by speaking to your AI. Your AI can be trained on data sets that you, or the parents, want. So you'll have your own personalized “familiar” —to refer to the old world of witchcraft — and it will do things for you.
China Talk (Apple, Spotify) | 78 minutes
🤔 Musing
Three articles and three podcasts, and only by rigorous curation not dominated by ‘AI.’ And the AI discussion itself seems split between spine-tingling optimism and massive orthodoxy. It’s true that “we fundamentally do not believe in our own adaptability.”
We built the digital foundation—products and services, content, communication, and now creativity. What's next will be on top of those foundations; we are at the end of the beginning; the most impactful changes are only getting started! It is time to build!