👋 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 chop shops and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
When Will AI Take Your Job?
Anybody can spin up a business and rake in millions. This is thanks to the immense productivity gains we’ve seen in technology in the last few decades. But these businesses aren’t likely to employ lots of people, given how productive they will be: If they can start the business alone, it’s because all these functions are automatable in the first place. It might still be valuable to hire others to scale, but not hundreds of thousands of people.
Tomas Pueyo—Unchartered Territories | 27 minutes
Does One Large Model Rule Them All?
There will be many entities contributing to the advance of the AI ecosystem. And numerous, high-utility AI systems will emerge, distinct from (single) general AI models. These AI systems will be complex in structure, powered by multiple AI models, APIs, etc, and will spur new technical AI developments. Well defined, high-value workflows will primarily be addressed by specialized AI systems not general purpose AI models.
Maithra Raghu | 8 minutes
Self Improvers Are Creating Their Own Careers Online (Here’s How):
You now have the opportunity to pursue meaningful work that unlocks the parts of the brain that modern society has neglected for so long. Humans can explore reality with passion, improve their skill set, and self-actualize. The future of work belongs to the self-reliant, self-educated, and those that pursue the creative opportunity that automation and AI have presented.
Dan Koe | 12 minutes
🎧 Listening
Fired from McKinsey to Top Business Thought Leader:
Go back 25 years, the end of the last century: lifetime employment was still the norm. Your identification was not your name but badge #273 in the XYZ division of GE, HP, or what have you. What I was saying is you are not going to survive that model in the future. You've got to stand for something. That was the entire story [..] I was doing the work that mattered to me; this eventually got me to be thrown out at McKinsey 7 Company.
Tom Peters—The Pathless Path | 32 minutes
The 12-cent Engineer:
[G]enerating a hundred lines of code a day [..] using the existing GPT-3 model pricing from Open AI, if you do the math, it works out to about 12 cents. And that makes this an extremely compelling financial argument to make, that, if a machine can automate these processes and it's 10.000 times cheaper than a human, you have to look at that very seriously; you can't just say, "Well, we're not gonna do that."
Matt Welsh—Danny in the Valley | 55 minutes
How can you tell if you're cut out for entrepreneurship?
[I]n the past, extreme behavior didn't really scale and it could be dampened locally by, kind of, if you like the forces of normality. But what the internet does is it takes that behavior and gives it a much bigger platform. And as a result, people that are sort of seeking maximum impact — seeking maximum stage time, if you like — are incentivized to act in an ever more extreme way, in order to be picked up and amplified in this way.
Matt Clifford—Clearer Thinking | 71 minutes
🏘️ Next Door
This week in Scenius Mag, a peek at what that future may hold… for education, platforms and businesses, and your —our— jobs.