Is there one link, story or idea that stopped you this week… and made you think, “someone else needs to see this”?
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 made a simple pact years ago. Once a week, each of us would share one link with the others… something we genuinely believed the other two had to see. No trend-hunting… no performance. Just six ideas exchanged with intent. What started as a small ritual between curious friends became Six Links That Make You Think.
These are the six links we passed to one another this week… take your time with them…
- Jevons Paradox: A Personal Perspective – Tina He – Fake Pixels. “It seems like 90% of my mental space is consumed with AI. We’re in a singularity—in the Foucault sense of a schism beyond which we cannot see what happens—and the only thing I know how to do is immerse myself in it, try things, experiment, and hope to make sense of the future. At times like this, I have a few lenses I use: Herbert Simon‘s framing of what’s abundant and what it consumes; Edward Tenner‘s take on why things bite back; and Jevons’ Paradox that says that for some things, an increase in supply creates an increase in demand because we find new uses for it. And there has never been a technology as paradoxical as AI. ‘Leisure’s opportunity cost skyrockets. When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience,’ argues Tina He. I really want to believe her conclusion: ‘What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you? It’s not just ‘you can just do things,’ but that ‘you can just be you, doing things.’ That sounds like a pipedream without some form of UBI.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- The New Opiate – Ramon Marc – Mold & Yeast. “Grim, true, and impossible to ignore. ‘In this world, you don’t scroll through viral dance or rage bait videos someone else made … You scroll through realities that were made/selected/optimized/generated/react for you.’ I guarantee you’ll lose sleep over this. Sorry.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- At Berghain, Art Meets The Quantum. And Something Goes Wrong – Silva Dal Dosso – Domus. “The music in this video installation, inside a converter power plant in Berlin, was created using a 100-qubit quantum simulator as a musical instrument, by ‘striking’ atoms and recording their reverberations in a vacuum (rather: translating the reverberations inside the vacuum where there is no sound, into equivalent reverberations in air, where sound was created). The main character, AI generated, is a woman with a cosmic emptiness where her face should be, wandering a rocky hellscape. A companion piece to Alistair’s New Opiate post perhaps. PS, all of you: go do some art, or have a walk outside, hug a human.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Trouble In Paradise: Goat, Tiger Separated After ‘Friends’ Get Into Spat – The Associated Press. “Back in 2015 Russian zookeepers fed a Siberian tiger with a live goat (standard practice at their zoo). Instead of eating the goat, the tiger – bigger, more powerful, and dangerous – became friends with it. In their initial meeting the goat showed some pluck. Maybe the tiger respected that, who knows. The tiger was getting well-fed anyway. Eventually, they started sleeping next to each other, playing together, eating together. The goat got a bit stroppy though, poked the tiger with its horns. The tiger grabbed the goat by the neck and threw it down a hill. Zoo keepers then separated the two, and the goat died, eventually, of natural causes. Living next to a big, predatory animal can be fun, until it stops being fun. I wish there was a good strategic metaphor in this story for Mark Carney in this story but maybe there isn’t.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Something Big Is Happening – Matt Shumer. “Following along with some more chipper news about our present with AI and the future as it unfolds. Normally I would not share an article that is making the rounds or going, as the kids call it, “viral”. But as this article started making the rounds earlier this week, I found myself noticing in the words several themes that I had already curated in a note document of thoughts that I should be writing about here or on LinkedIn. This is a very important read. It’s an important read for you as an individual currently in the workforce. It might be an even more important read if you have children and are thinking about what the future might hold for them or the standard aspirations that many of us, as parents, hold as being dear and sacred. We want to believe that our ability to think, reason and have judgement is going to be what separates us from artificial intelligence. While that might be the case, it’s hard for me not to look at an email that I personally toiled over and wrote without any generative AI assistance, and then read it several hours later and not be able to tell if I had actually written it… or AI could have. That’s the baseline we need to think about. The evolution of these technologies is coming to a place where I look at a lot of content and I sincerely can’t tell if that person created it or if AI created it for them. Perhaps more importantly, how much input they even had in the creation of that content. Maybe even scarier, a lot of that content is better than pretty good. Read this article and then spend some time looking in the mirror. Right now, if you want to know where my anxiety lies… it’s right here.” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Yuval Noah Harari And Max Tegmark On Humanity And AI – Bloomberg Live – YouTube. “A fireside chat from Davos featuring two of the big brain thinkers that I pay a lot of attention to. Yes, Harari is almost completely in the doomer camp and terrified of what we’re doing with AI, while Tegmark sees the worry, but is hopeful that humans can make AI works for us… not against us. At a macro level, this is the root cause of this tech anxiety that I have been experiencing lately. How is it that two intellectuals like this can’t help us all cool our nerves about what is happening in our world. At a micro-level, I love Tegmark’s thinking around… yes, it would be great if AI cured cancer… so let’s just put all of the regulations and laws in place so that we focus on the good and not the detrimental. Ugh, I am over-simplifying the arguments… watch this… it’s captivating…” (Mitch for Hugh).
If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…
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