Transistor-radio stage
The Copilot opportunity (and crisis) ⓧ Neal Stephenson’s most stunning prediction ⓧ The new Luddites
👋 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
What Can be Done in 59 Seconds: An Opportunity (and a Crisis)
For many people in many organizations, their measurable output is words - words in emails, in reports, in presentations. We use words as proxy for many things: the number of words is an indicator of effort, the quality of the words is an indicator of intelligence, the degree to which the words are error-free is an indicator of care […] now every employee with Copilot can produce work that checks all the boxes of a formal report without necessarily representing underlying effort.
Ethan Mollick—One Useful Thing | 9 minutes
Neal Stephenson’s Most Stunning Prediction:
Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society. We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI […] I’m sure that some things are going to emerge that I wouldn’t dare try to predict, because the results of the creative frenzy of millions of people is always more interesting than what a single person can think of.
The Atlantic | 8 minutes
The New Luddites Aren’t Backing Down:
What I’ve seen over the past 10 years […] has left me sympathizing with tech’s discontents. After years of workers and citizens serving as Silicon Valley’s subjects, a movement is now under way to wrest back control. I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself […] we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality” […] and oppose it when necessary.
Brian Merchant | 14 minutes
🎧 Listening
Tech Layoff Surge. The End of Coding:
Content became the new software where a lot of value creation shifted from the tech stack, the infrastructure of building that first TV. Now that it's built, we don't need the builders for that. We just need someone to maintain this TV and then value shifts into the shows' creation […] When Twitch is laying off 35 percent of its staff, software engineers, managers, college educated nine-to-five folks, its top star and streamer is […] finding a potentially $75 million deal.
TechLead | 11 minutes
Mol: 20:33 -+ middle class
Game Over:
All of these companies were trying to represent as tech to get the better multiples. […] It doesn't mean building your new tech, but having people within the company that understand technology as it's moving and trying to build stuff from their new formats, taking advantage of new platforms, moving really quickly and trying all that stuff out. So I would say that it's wise to want to become a tech-forward company, but at the same time, shouldn't every company be?
Alex Schleifer—People vs Algorithms | 60 minutes
What can physics tell us about ourselves?
You don't care that you don't exactly repair your liver or your lungs and so forth, as long as it lasts for 35 40 years. There's one organ that you better repair faithfully and that's your brain because that damage very quickly results in you not being you after a relatively short time […] And that's why your brain takes proportionately much more metabolic energy than the rest of your body. It's because it's fighting the forces of entropy; if you didn't combat them, you die
Complexity | 35 minutes
💎 Timeless
1️⃣ year ago—John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artificial General Intelligence
2️⃣ years ago—Non-Fungible People
3️⃣ years ago—Retail, rent and things that don't scale