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…
- How Tenaciously Palantir Courted Switzerland – Adrienne Fichter – Republik. “Palantir‘s early public narrartive was that they would build a safer society—without curtailing personal privacy. That mission has shifted substantially as US governments have sought deeper visibility into what their citizens and visitors do, and now Palantir is a very different company, pursuing very different goals. Using FOIA requests, Republik documents how, over the course of seven years, the Swiss government turned down Palantir’s advances nine separate times, Here’s the seldom-seen underbelly of enterprise sales in geopolitical rifts.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- I Stalked Cyberpunk’s NPCs (Until I Lost My Mind) – Bandercoot – YouTube. “Cyberpunk 2077 has an ambitious history. It’s a sci-fi first-person roleplaying game that counts Keanu Reeves among its voice talents, and clearly borrows from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. I’ve played it, and the game does a good job of making a city feel alive. But it takes a certain kind of obsessive to spend days in game, checking whether characters have minds of their own, and what happens when you try to interrupt their routines. And then, of course, it descends into a profound question of whether we’re all NPCs.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- For Three Years I Scoured The World For Answers To Europe’s Big Problems – here’s what I found – John Kampfner – The Guardian. “This article is a bit shorter on revelatory answers than I would like, but it points out something Alistair has rightfully dedicated a lot of time to lately (mostly in the govt/digital realm): there are successful solutions to societal problems out there. It’s amazing in our time of instant information and global access how slow systems are to adapt better solutions. Of course when you dig in you see piles structural and architectural reasons why solution ‘X won’t work here’, but often these are due to decisions made 20 or 50 years ago that we could, with courage and focus, undo and redo. Our politicians, and our civil servants, need the public to put the pressure on. What has worked for 20 years is no longer working, and we need to find ways to make it easier for out societies to adapt.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- An Open Letter From The Medical Community On America’s Road Deaths – Jonathan Slotkin & Eric Topol – Voices From The Doximity Network. “Very interesting how bad human intuitions can be. The majority of news headlines about self-driving that passes through my feed seems to be of the ‘another self-driving Tesla crashed’ variety. And people don’t want robots running them over. Yet the data is overwhelming: cars are the leading cause of death among Americans aged 16 to 24, accounting for 50% of deaths in that age group. Peer reviewed data shows a ~90% reduction in accidents from self-driving cars (Waymo has produced the data, and Swiss Re has done the study).” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Forced Futures – Johannes Kleske – The Future Lens. “I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about narratives and storytelling. In relation to AI, I’m not surprised that we are now suddenly seeing this surge of backlash against the technology. We have this in every disruptive cycle. I am somewhat taken aback by how quickly the tide has turned, in particular when you look at the market capitalization and capital expenditure of these massive organizations. On the other hand it makes perfect sense. Companies pushing a narrative about a technology that doesn’t really have much opportunity for individual humans, while at the same time being some type of savior for all of humanity? It’s a strange narrative (I write about it more over here: From AI Hype To AI Hate?). Once again, Sentiers handed me this gem of a link. The future is not fixed, and we can shape it by taking action instead of just hoping or fearing. Utopias and dystopias are tools to inspire change, but what we really need is ‘anti-dystopia’… a way to act imperfectly and persistently against collapse. This mindset embraces doing what we can, even without guarantees, because trying matters more than waiting for a perfect solution. Who is up for a good try?” (Mitch for Alistair).
- AI Layoffs Are Here. This Is How You Keep Your Job – Mo Bitar – YouTube. “What’s the old saying… if you don’t laugh… you’ll cry? Have a laugh…” (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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