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…

• Grond.ai. “The rate of new apps people are building ‘just because they wanted them to exist’ is astonishing. Freed from the cost of deploying software, everyone I speak with is launching apps. I have no idea how we’ll curate all of this. Here’s a news intelligence platform that analyzes hundreds of sources and gives you credible information.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• World Monitor. “Need to keep track of the apocalypse? There’s an app for that too. A realtime global intelligence dashboard that tracks geopolitics, infrastructure, and security. Also free, under an MIT license. We really aren’t ready for a world where apps are flooding our feeds. Maybe it’s time to change the name of this experiment of ours to Six Apps That Make You Think? ;-)” (Alistair for Mitch). 
• Angine de Poitrine – Full Performance (Live on KEXP) – KEXP – YouTube. “I haven’t heard/seen music that made me this happy in years. This band is either from outer space or the Saguenay region of Quebec, depending on who you believe. Their name means coronary chest pain. Their music is microtonal math groove, or ‘Le mystérieux orchestre rock microtonal frénétique.’ I wasn’t sure who was going to get this link – Alistair the DJ, or Mitch the 80s progmetal nerd. I flipped a coin. You may hate it. If not, you will be playing it on loop for the next few days.” (Hugh for Alistair). 
• Nearly Half Of L.A. County’s Pavement May Be Unnecessary, New Map Finds – Meg Tanaka – Los Angeles Times. “I love the idea of making our cities more livable. Montreal has many flaws, but it has made incredible investments in small scale greenspaces, like curb extensions and stormwater planters with native wildflowers. LA is a city famous for… pavement. But a study suggests that without touching core infrastructure, it could be something different.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis – Alap Shah – Citrini Research. “Another week, another viral article about our potential future outcomes because of AI. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we are receiving information about our future and how we are thinking about it. I’m starting to recognize a pattern. Articles like this act in absolutes. It is either this way or that way. I’m not sure why so many intelligent people are digging in and picking such disruptive and distinctive sides. Yes, it is quite possible that we will land in some type of extreme situation but also more than likely it will be a little bit of what you read in an article like this and a lot of something else. We have had really transformative technologies change us as humanity… always. In the end the curve isn’t more desolation and less work. It seems like with every transformation the world keeps moving forward. I’m not saying it’s perfect but I am saying, in an overall arc, it tends to work out for the humans. Is that the big question right now? The narrative we are being sold in this one says that AI is rapidly replacing jobs, causing wages and spending to drop sharply. Companies keep investing more in AI to cut costs, which leads to more layoffs and a shrinking economy. This cycle, according to this research, risks a broad financial crisis as debt rises and traditional economic patterns break down. This mirrors a lot fo what Cory Doctorow was saying on my podcast the other week as well. I’m just sitting here wondering if all of this tech won’t unlock a whole other level of economic and professional opportunity… Am I being too optimistic?” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Writing Crystalized Thinking At Amazon. Is AI Muddying It? – Kristi Coulter. “I know that everybody can’t stop sharing the article that I just picked for Alistair this week, but this is the one I can’t stop thinking about. It’s also the one I have been sharing in text message exchanges the most this week. It’s something I knew Amazon had been doing, but never contextualized intellectually in my head. This idea that before a meeting the leader would prepare a very strategic document that everybody would read and then have a conversation about, versus PowerPoints or open agendas for a corporate meeting. Again I had known about this strategy and found it very compelling. What I didn’t know is that as generative AI encroaches into our working lives, so too has it seeped into strategies like this. What is happening? Well according to this journalist, it is making their meetings much less effective because the way the artificial intelligence is pumping out these documents isn’t all that unique. It’s becoming generic, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense. If it’s aggregating all of the documents and ranking them in some way, you would think that it would create a basic mean of ’success’. What probably made these documents unique before is that the person writing them was thinking through their work and making it articulate before sharing it. What’s my reaction? The words you’re reading aren’t the net result of a prompt. A lot of the work that got these words onto this page comes from years and years of studying and reading and working and being in the trenches. It’s not necessarily the stuff that would come out if you took a bunch of documents and looked for some type of unifying analytic of success. Writing is thinking. Don’t forget that.” (Mitch for Hugh)

If one of these sticks with you, pass it on… and let us know what earned your attention this week…

Before you go… ThinkersOne  is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.