Uncomfortable Tech
6 New Theories about AI, Retail Romanticism Revivalism, and The Lifecycle of Uncomfortable Tech
👋 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
6 New Theories About AI:
There is already more content created than we can ever consume. My wife and I have a backlog of movies and TV shows that is hundreds of hours long. We’ll never finish it. Will it matter if AI adds more stuff to that backlog? The ability to break through and require me to pay attention requires a level of fandom and marketing that cheap content can’t match. Expect to consume more from your favorite creators and less from everyone else.
Evan Armstrong—Napkin Math | 14 minutes
Retail Romanticism Revivalism:
It feels relatively safe to assume that technology is now a part of everything, that data will continue to collect and inform customer behavior […] But — now might be a good time to be open to the idea that sometimes intuition beats over-thinking, that visionaries often arrive on less linear paths, and that creating things that feel exciting, or even groundbreaking, will require placing some bets on ideas that data doesn’t know anything about yet.
Amanda Greeley—As if it Matters | 5 minutes
The Lifecycle of Uncomfortable Tech:
With the rise of Generative Tech, we are in for a frenzy of newness. It could make some groups of people uncomfortable for the next 2-3 years […] Most big tech revolutions bring with it a wave of fear that people will lose their jobs to machines, robots and AI […] I know it always “feels different this time.” But it turns out that the lifecycle of uncomfortable tech repeats itself, and that the stages are predictable if you take the time to look.
James Currier—NfX | 12 minutes
🎧 Listening
All the other things happening in tech:
There is now infinite media and infinite retail space. As both a consumer and as a company, it's a problem and an opportunity. You have this blank canvas for creating new brands […] You used to use the Internet for price comparison: you knew what you wanted and went to the Internet and searched 'cheap.' Now you go to the Internet and search 'best' because you want to know what to get; you're using the Internet for recommendation and curation.
Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans—Another Podcast | 30 minutes
Is A Healing Supply Chain Fixing Our Economy?
You're going to ship stuff based on what are the economics of the product itself; are you making money, and is there a demand for it? If the price of shipping falls in half, that doesn't mean you're going to ship twice as much; you're going to ship about the same amount of stuff. And similarly, if the price of shipping goes way up, you're still going to keep shipping stuff as long as it doesn't totally break your business […] That’s how you get these price generations.
Ryan Petersen—Big Technology Podcast | 50 minutes
On Creation and Curation:
[Y]ou still need to have pretty good taste to produce good images. People will just jump in and it's easy to make crap too […] The execution and having the idea has been kind of disconnected. You don't need to be a great painter to paint the idea, but some people have tons of great ideas that they would never have executed otherwise. And so these ideas exist now because of these tools.
Liberty RPF—Infinite Loops | 95 minutes
🎁 One More Thing
The Innovator features an interview with Ron on how to cope with change and think about the future. It is behind a paywall, but you can sign up for a free 4-week trial. This quote captures to vibe nicely:
We are all in the same boat. We are all learning. Today we may be amateurs, but this is still playing out. We can still shape ecosystem innovation and new opportunities like the metaverse. Think of the future as a book that hasn’t been written yet. We get to write the book. Once you realize that, you will be amazed by what energy that unlocks.