Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

• Replacement.ai. “I do love me some good satire. When that satire rings so true it’s plausible, then I start to worry.” (Alistair for Hugh).
  
• I Deleted My Second Brain – JA Westenberg. “I have thousands of notes, mails sent to myself, half-assed prosthetic brains sitting in the cloud and on devices. I’m not sure why they’re there; some sense that the idea is the thing, and one day an ancestor or AI will leaf through them, professing my genius down through the ages. Apparently I’m not alone; JA Westenberg had a similar fetish with note-taking, until one day—perhaps informed by her sobriety—she decided to say goodbye to the past. And found it liberating. After reading this, I’m this close to doing the same, and living, terrifyingly, in the present.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• The Prophecies Of Paul Kingsnorth – John Gray – The New Statesman. “I haven’t been this excited by a book review in a while, and I look forward to this book. It hits on something that has nagged me about environmentalism, and the dominant culture of the progressive left (which is in many ways my culture), and that is that somehow in ways I can’t quite explain, enviromentalism and most left-culture are somehow a critical part of the maintaining structures of neo-liberalism. And I guess I could pack in more jargon, but instead some quotes: ‘What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, one and the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?’ ‘Only incidentally concerned with the environment, 21st-century environmentalism is another iteration of the anthropocentric boosterism that has brought the world to its present impasse.’ ‘The rising paranoia that extends now across the political spectrum throughout the Western world – the anger and confusion, the sense of promises broken and established systems gumming up – all this can be traced to the rise and consolidation of the Machine, this great matrix that strips from us our understanding of what a human life is, and makes us instead lonely cogs in its drive for self-creation.'”  (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Dawn Of The Post-Literate Society – James Marriott – Cultural Capital. “The rise and fall of the book; the fall and rise of oral culture; the rise and fall of most of what we hold dear?” (Hugh for Mitch).
• AI Means The End Of Internet Search As We’ve Known It – Mat Honan – MIT Technology Review. “Lately, I have been thinking a lot about subtle changes that push massive shifts, and how we don’t always see them. Of course, there was talk about how ChatGPT could disrupt search in the early days of generative AI (a few years ago). Still, it seems to be moving beyond a creeping idea that ChatGPT could topple and/or change Google into something much different these days. Whether it’s seeing AI summaries at the top of search results on Google… or taking a look at OpenAI‘s latest venture: their new web browser, Atlas. It is becoming clear that we are having a more conversational relationship with the internet. That is creating a massive shift in both how we navigate it, where the traffic is generated, and, of course, how the money is made. It wasn’t long ago that I would have scoffed at the idea that AI will replace link-based web search with conversational answers generated by large language models. Now, it seems so obvious that this will happen. This breaks it down, and it’s well worth the read.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• An AI Tool For Learning Critical Thinking – Vaughn Tan. “And as if on cue, I came across this link from Sentiers that dovetails perfectly into the link above. Students rely on AI to write essays and are losing critical thinking skills (putting aside the fact that it’s cheating and/or something the schools have yet to understand or figure out). Confidence Interval is a tool that guides students (or anyone) through structured prompts so they can sharpen their own arguments instead of getting machine-generated content. Early tests show students move from vague ideas to clear, evidence-based arguments in under two hours. This is the way I have always thought about how humans will stay in the loop. I’m just hopeful that the vast majority of people can get beyond the idea that it’s a simple answering machine.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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