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…
- Clawed – Dean W. Ball – Hyperdimensional. “A post on Anthropic and the Department of War. It made me think differently about military supply. Many have characterized what Anthropic has done as qualitative: A fighter jet doesn’t make decisions, but an AI does, so its operating limits are different. On the surface, this makes sense: a military contractor traditionally had, well, a contract that defined how their product could be used. If you flew a jet too high, that was on you. The contractor dictated how it could be used, and the government chose how it would be used. This article shifted my thinking: in a functioning democracy, the government would refuse to violate its constitution (by, for example, surveilling its own citizens). Private companies (who have personhood thanks to Citizens United) are now conscientious objectors, conflating ‘could’ with ‘would’ because they don’t trust their government to act in what they see as humanity’s best interests. Interesting times indeed.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Behind The Scenes Of The Westworld UI – Tobias van Schneider. “When everyone can build something, new problems appear: What should we spend our time on? Are we good enough/the right person to build it? Many of these questions come down to taste, which is one of the most obvious, yet hard-to-quantify things that defines a human. I’ve been building a lot of things, and the UX is always one release away: ‘Does it work?’ isn’t the same as ‘Is it great?’, and UX is the key. Here’s how a designer thinks, unconstrained, about what user interfaces for managing AI agents might look like.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Canadians Slide To New Low In Happiness Index – ER Velasco – The Deep Dive. “A decade ago, Canada ranked 6th for life satisfaction in the World Happiness Index. We’ve dropped to 25. More striking, if you ask those under the age of 25, we rank 71st. Yes, you read that right. One sliver of positivity is that if you carve out Quebec, that province would rank 5th in the world (though if you did that, Canada would drop to 35th!). My hunch is that the cost of housing is the biggest driver of this decline, but however you slice it this is more bad data that should terrify us all. I keep coming back to this feeling that Canada has become a complacent country, across industry and governments. I hope numbers like these shake us out of our stupor. I would also dearly love to see some deeper analysis about the difference between Quebec and the rest of the country. My intuition is that the deep connection to culture and identity of Quebec plays a big role, more so than social programs. But would love to see more research on this, as it should help shape country wide policies.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Why Hasn’t AI Made Work Easier? – Cal Newport. “Cal Newport on a worrisome trend of AI in the workplace, that instead of freeing us to spend more time on deep/thinking work, it is accelerating and increasing busy-work. I wonder. I know in my own work I rely heavily on AI for all sorts of things (mostly as a powerful ‘thought partner’). I do wonder occasionally, though, if my dance with AI to craft the right email, the right proposal, the wording on this slide, actually slows me down rather than speeds me up.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Engineering Is The New Design – Jon Evans – AI Ascendant. “I keep coming back to this idea that if AI lets fewer engineers manage way more projects (and many more parts of the project)… what happens to every other function inside a business? This piece frames engineering as the new layer of design (which is interesting and smart and probable), but the more interesting angle (at least to me) is what that does to teams like marketing (or any other department that isn’t IT inside the company)… do we end up with fewer marketers running more campaigns, orchestrating AI systems instead of actually building things? It sounds efficient… but it also starts to mess with how teams work together. If one person can prompt, generate and ship… where does collaboration live (and where is the oversight)? What happens to the back-and-forth that used to sharpen ideas? And then there’s the bigger issue… how do we even measure what ‘good’ looks like when the person guiding the system might not fully understand all of the steps that lead to the output? The tools scale fast… but taste, judgment, skill experience and accountability don’t magically keep up. If this is the direction we’re heading, it raises a bigger question than productivity… it’s about how we work, how we decide, and how we know if we’re actually getting better…” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Why AI Might Not Replace Your Job After All – Bloomberg Television. “I found this segment very thoughtful… and this (for me) is the problem. I can watch a video like this and think, ‘yes… this makes perfect sense!’… and then I can watch another video giving the complete opposite perspective and intellectually agree with it as a possible future… ugh… is it just me? So, I think we’re still (maybe) telling ourselves the wrong story about AI and jobs… this video pushes back on the idea that AI just replaces people and instead frames it as something that lets individuals do a lot more, which sounds optimistic… but I keep wondering what that actually looks like inside an organization (see above). If one person can now do the work of three or five… are we redesigning teams around that, or just quietly expecting more output from fewer people? And if AI is doing more of the “doing”… how do we know if the person using it is actually good at the work, or just good at prompting? It also raises a bigger question about what new jobs really mean… are they higher-value roles, or just different wrappers around the same pressure to produce? The technology clearly expands capacity… but it also blurs accountability, skill and how we measure contribution… and that tension feels like the part most people are skipping over… or not talking about enough…” (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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