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…
- Guide On The Use Of Agentic Artificial Intelligence – Government Of Canada. “The Canadian government has published guidance on the use of agentic AI. While much of the Federal public servic is still learning how to prompt Copilot better, it’s good to see the country’s policymakers getting ahead of the curve and thinking about the implications of a blended workforce. Agents are slowly sliding through the Hype Curve – from the peak of expectations to the trough of despair – as news from the frontlines shows that they currently can’t perform many tasks. But there’s no doubt agents are more than just macros, and they’re upending the economics of any task that can be quantified and improved iteratively. The definition of an agent is surprisingly clear: something that can ‘perceive and act on their environment, often autonomously, to achieve specific goals and adapt their behaviour in response to changing inputs or contexts.’ Good start.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Don’t Buy AI Bath Bombs – Pleasant Green – YouTube. “I’m sharing this for two reasons. First, it’s a hilarious example of AI slop, and how it preys on the uninformed. Watch as a simple bath bomb becomes a weird rainbow chemical spill—which is apparently an endorsement of some kind. But my Just Evil Enough brain thought about the motivation for the video. At 1:36 the presenter says, ‘so to play it safe I used a virtual credit card from Privacy.com … who also happens to be sponsoring this video.’ If you’re an anonymous credit card company, you probably can’t promote the more … typical uses of such a card. So finding folks who expose scammers (like this channel, Pleasant Green) is one way to showcase your offering. Then again, the Haw Par brothers (makers of Tiger Balm) created their own newspapers to showcase their offerings, and Amazon is now running ads on Prime for products sold on Amazon.com. Wouldn’t it be smart for Privacy.com to just create creator channels, particularly now that the cost of producing (automated) content is dropping precipitously? If so, the future of marketing is weirdly chicken-and-egg. It’s no longer clear what comes first: the creator channel, or the product sponsoring it—something we called a medium-first go-to-market strategy.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- From Open Source Software To Open Source Strategy – Bill Gurley – P3 Institute. “Fascinating and detailed overview of how huge companies have leveraged open source to success, with examples from Android (2007, Google competing with Apple‘s iPhone dominance) to the Overture Maps Foundation (2022, where Amazon, Meta and others compete with Google’s mapping data dominance). Looking to the future, two areas where the author thinks Open Source will undermine dominance: autonomous vehicles and AI.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- How Worried Should You Be About Climate Change? How Worried Should I Be To Talk To You About it? – Misha Glouberman – Misha’s Substack. “Three years ago I saw Misha give a talk at Alistair’s Bitnorth conference, which rocked my understanding of climate change risks, and three years later (finally) here is Misha’s article. Misha spent months trying to find the scientific data and projections showing that climate change is truly a humanity-erasing risk. What he found, underneath the headlines, were studies showing that climate change is a big human welfare problem, but one with impacts on the same scale as other health problems, such as diabetes and smoking. We do lots to combat these problems, but no one believes that smoking or diabetes will eradicate humanity. Many people think that’s true of climate change. How do we know what we know and what sits under it? Further, what should we do about it?” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Can AI Make People Feel Less Lonely? – The Daily – New York Times Podcast. “I was out for my morning walk listening to this podcast that, on multiple occassions, both broke my heart and warmed it at the same time. Putting aside the fascinating story that is absolutely worth your time to listen to, this is another stunning example of how valuable podcasts are to the media ecosystem. As human beings, we want simple answers but more often than not the answer to the question is much more complicated and nuanced. You will really feel it emotionally in this podcast. The relationship that this isolated person builds with AI is both beautiful and terrifying… all at once. And it’s easy to blame the creators of the technology and equally easy to blame a family of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren that cannot collectively help the matriarch of their family feel less lonely. This is a staggering story, well worth anyone’s time who’s interested in exploring the value and potential threat of new technology.” (Mitch for Alistair).
- She Has 400,000 Instagram Followers And Major Brand Deals. She’s Also AI – Eve Upton-Clark – Fast Company. “We can sit and debate (all day and night) whether or not people want AI-generated content. We can debate whether they even know if something was created with AI. We can even drill down and talk about special effects and why that was not an issue for people (also fake). We can keep going and talk about how the professionals who made those special effects still had the art, creativity and deep skills to create special effects… and weren’t just using text prompts. I don’t know where this ends, but ultimately the market is brutal and the market decides. In this instance, it looks like the market has decided they are quite okay with this type of ‘content’. This AI created Instagram ‘influencer’ has nearly 400,000 followers and works with major brands and is managed by a team of creators. Now, is this article true? Do many young people trust AI influencers? And are more and more companies investing in AI-driven marketing?” (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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