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:

• Signs Of AI Writing – Wikipedia. “‘I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture writing involved in this case is not that’. With apologies to United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart – who committed one of the worst sins of jurisprudence by making the law arbitrary – this is how I feel about AI. I know it when I see it. Well, Wikipedia has seen a lot of it. So many, in fact, that it made a list of tell-tale signs.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Great Unbundling: Why AI Won’t Kill Jobs — It Will Kill The Job – Krish – AI Sutra. “Last summer at Startupfest I predicted that SaaS companies had only a few years until ‘pay for functionality’ becomes ‘pay for outcomes’. You don’t buy tax software or a CRM; instead, you buy a completed tax return or a meeting in your calendar. Krish does a much better job than me of taking this to its logical conclusion: What if the ‘job’ – paying a person per hour to perform an activity – existed simply because it was too hard to attribute their output to them? And what if we can now do so? The consequences are unsettling at best, and worth a read.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Opoyastin: Wolves Of The Big Wind – Alicia-Rae Light – Canadian Geographic. “As the human world gets more chaotic, let’s reflect on the majesty of some of our other travellers on this planet.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – Gal Beckerman – The Atlantic. “I remember taking a class in Cegep (Quebec’s pre-university college) about Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and my absolute shock at the Miller’s Tale. In it, poor Absolon, hoping for a kiss at the window of his unrequited love Alison, instead gets a face full of butt. She stuck her ass out the window when he asked for a kiss. He comes back later planning for revenge, and asks for a kiss again. This time, Alison’s lover Nicholas sticks his ass out the window, and farts in Absolon’s face, ‘as greet as it had been a thonder-dent.’ I suppose I thought that illicit sex, and farting, had been invented in the mid 1960s, but it turns out both were as exciting and funny in 1380 as in 199x. But do we experience emotions the same way our ancestors did? (I suspect the answer is yes).” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Skywalker Stories – YouTube. “This week, Disney announced that they have reached an agreement with OpenAI to being their characters to live in Sora… allowing the consumer to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters. Now, we’ve had fan-fiction and even fan-generated movies for some time. Take this as a example. Start from the latest video and work your way back only a year to see just how far both the tools to create with AI and the quality of what comes out the other side… and be amazed. Fans of Star Wars (or even if you’re not) are already deep into the content creation and it’s able to (when mixed with the right creator) have stunning results. With that, I have my concerns as well…” (Mitch for Alistair).
• If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books? – Jay Caspian Kang – The New Yorker. “Why do I think tomorrow I’ll wake up and suddenly do all the things I’ve always wanted to do in a world where I’ve never done them before? I’m not doing it justice, but I know that there is a funny meme out there with that theme. This article speaks a little bit to that idea. As we start heading into the holiday season, I know many people start compiling books that they’re going to read while they’re away on holiday. Will you get distracted and simply further your brain rot on Instagram, or will you finally be able to break the shackles of your digital addiction and spend some time with lots of words in deep thought? People think quitting social media would make them read more books and live better lives. The internet trains us to want fast, optimized experiences, while books seem slow and inefficient (they are not!). That gap makes it hard to swap scrolling for serious reading… but it can… and it should be done…” (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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