👋 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 – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
📚 Reading
‘Crossing the river by feeling the stones’:
Not knowing has heavy implications. When you really do not know what’s coming next, there’s no logical calculus you can bring to bear, so the rational decision-making process gets ruled out. That means that the whole rational decision-making doctrine you’re taught in business school no longer applies. When you really do not know what’s coming next, there’s no logical calculus you can bring to bear … What’s needed in this situation is not rational calculation but resilience.
Brian Arthur—McKinsey Quarterly | 16 minutes
AI Lies, Privacy, & OpenAI:
The inability of RLHF to completely squash unwanted output raises significant questions, both regarding privacy and safe harbor regulation. There’s no standard for how much counter-training a company should perform to correct an erroneous output. We lack metrics for quantifying how significantly a bad bit of training data contributes to a model or a model’s tendency for lying about a particular topic.
Drew Breunig | 25 minutes
Sci-Fi Idea Bank:
When a sci-fi writer comes up with an idea, it floats around in latent space, waiting to be pulled down when the necessary underlying technologies finally exist and hit their sweet spot on the cost and performance curves. When the time is right, an inventor or entrepreneur grabs it and tries to wrestle it into the real world. Viewed another way, sci-fi is a goldmine of ideas for startups. There are thousands of ideas waiting to be built when the time is right.
Packy McCormick—Not Boring | 10 minutes
🎧 Listening
AI and the feasibility of 'technosocialism’:
What markets are all about is discovery of information that previously doesn't exist. And it's this wicked learning environment within the commercial society that requires the tools of property rights to incentivize us, prices to guide us in our decisions, profits to lure us and losses to discipline us. And without those tools of the commercial society, we are basically without a compass floating around. [..] It's not going to come from an algorithm.
Pete Boettke—🚀 Faster, Please! | 37 minutes
Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent:
Part of the reason you want to find young founders who’ve done stuff from side projects is that it guarantees the idea is not bullshit. Because if young founders sit down and try to think of a start-up idea, it’s more likely to be bullshit because they don’t have any experience of the world. Older founders can do things like start supersonic aircraft companies, and actually get it right. Younger founders are likely to get things wrong if they try and do stuff like that. It’s a heuristic for finding matches between young founders and ideas.
Paul Graham—Conversations with Tyler | 55 minutes
The Future of Software Development:
If we want to get to the point of 1000x productivity, where three-person startups are essentially running the equivalent business of what are today 500,000-person companies, we need to parallelize. And this is where the bots and the agents come in, where instead of just speeding up the act of writing text, you have multiple employees, essentially, multiple agents or bots, that are working with you in parallel to execute [...] all of the labour that's necessary to create software at large scales.
Tyler Angert—Cognitive Revolution | 105 minutes