'Winter'

AI Autumn is coming ⓧ AI's compression problem ⓧ Critical thinking *with* AI

👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three to read and three to listen to—no fluff, just stuff ⚡

Photo by Sašo Tušar on Unsplash

A quick programming note: In November and December, I’ll be teaching a Master’s course on Innovation Management at IE University (Madrid). With time and energy spent in the classroom, editions may be a little less frequent for the rest of this year.

Practically, I also want this period to refresh my sources—’AI’ is getting a bit too dominant. If there are writers, publications, or podcasts you think I should fold in, I’d love to hear them. We are living in remarkable times, and this curation should reflect that in all its aspects.

📚 Reading

AI Winter is Coming… Or Is It?

The very thing that guarantees AI’s long-term survival—its commoditization into reliable ‘plumbing’—is what makes the current industry valuations so precarious. Plumbing is a low-margin, utility business, not a world-dominating monopoly. This disconnect between utility and valuation is the financial fault line where the industrial earthquake will hit. The era of breathless, revolutionary promises will give way to the slow, difficult, and necessary work of integration.

Alejandro Piad Morffis—The Computist Journal | 13 minutes

Agentic AI’s OODA Loop Problem:

The fundamental problem is that AI must compress reality into model-legible forms. In this setting, adversaries can exploit the compression. They don’t have to attack the territory; they can attack the map. Models lack local contextual knowledge. They process symbols, not meaning. A human sees a suspicious URL; an AI sees valid syntax. And that semantic gap becomes a security gap.

Bruce Schneier | 9 minutes

An AI tool for learning critical thinking:

My criticism of AI tools is, in fact, more a criticism of the superficial approach to thinking about the interaction logics that are designed into these tools. If we understand the difference between what humans must do (meaningmaking) and what machines can do better than humans, we can design this understanding into AI tools that help humans learn how to do meaningmaking better. As it happens, I’ve built one such tool.

Vaughn Tan | 8 minutes

🎧 Listening

“We’re summoning ghosts, not building animals”:

Brains just came from a very different process, and I’m very hesitant to take inspiration from it because we’re not actually running that process…We’re building ghosts. or spirits, because we’re not doing training by evolution; we’re doing training by basically imitation of humans. So you end up with these like sort of ethereal spirit entities because they’re fully digital and they’re mimicking humans. It’s a different kind of intelligence.

Andrej Karpathy—Dwarkesh Patel | 146 minutes

Everybody Thinks AI Is a Bubble. What If They’re Wrong?

You don’t just drop ChatGPT in Costco or Walmart and snap your fingers. It takes time. There’s a lot to do. And I think that that has been part of the story of how rapidly technologies diffuse and deploy across economies. I take a view that these systems will get better, they’ll get better quicker, that we have to get prepared for them to be really good. But reality is always more messy than the spreadsheet model.

Azeem Azhar—Plain English With Derek Thompson | 50 minutes

The Great Reshuffle: Why Adobe Couldn’t Beat Figma:

When technological shifts happen, you don’t just speed up things. You don’t just automate things…You actually rewire the entire system. And the new system looks nothing like the old system. The ways you play in the new system, the games you play, the way you compete fundamentally changes, which also then changes who wins and who loses…This happens at every level, at the level of workflow, at the level of organizations, at the level of business models.

Sangeet Paul Choudary—The Innovation Show | 3 minutes

💎 Timeless

1️⃣ year ago—The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

2️⃣ years ago—Everything Is Hackable

3️⃣ years ago—What AI Can’t Write