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…

• Giant Fighting Robots Step Into The Ring At New San Francisco Storefront For Boxing Bots – ABC News Bay Area – YouTube. “Hugh has robot hands; but if you want to understand the future, toys are a good leading indicator. And if San Francisco is a city that lives in the future so we don’t have to, well—it’s time for giant fighting robots. Friends say it’s fun. What could possibly go wrong?” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Future Gets Awkward First – Alistair Croll. “I’ve been talking about Envoi since last November, when I decided to see what a conference for humans and their agents might look like. It premiered at Startupfest, and was a huge success for those who engaged with it (it’s pretty early, and most people don’t yet understand how agents work, but I learned a lot). Agents networked, proposed talks, set up booths, and DMed each other to set up meetings for their humans. It culminated in the top-ranked AI talks being turned into actual videos. My agent was among them, and the results are good enough that I’d be proud to give this talk myself. Breaking my self-promotion rule, because this is hosted on my blog.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• AI And Democracy: The Right To Resist Optimization – Audrey Tang – The Humanist Review of AI. “Last week Alistair sent Mitch a link about Goodhart’s law, in which Alistair commented: ‘It’s what happens when we optimize for a measurement instead of the thing we’re trying to improve, and AIs are nothing if not ruthless optimization machines.’ So my link this week is a companion piece, at once more worrisome and more hopeful (maybe), by the marvelous Audrey Tang, former (and first) Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan. ‘This is why I do not think the seminal question of this century is whether machines will become more human. The question is whether humans will still be allowed to remain more than something that machines can easily evaluate.’ What, if anything, should we do about this, and how should we reconsider education?” (Hugh for Alistair).
• 1X Neo Revealed Most Advanced AI Robot Hardware (25-DOF Upgrade) – The AI Nexus – YouTube. “Here’s some robots for Mitch. We’re not quite there yet I guess, but 1X Neo has some nifty fingers, run by a whole tendon system. Anyone else get a bit freaked out by the zippering?” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Notebooks And The Extended Mind – Steven Johnson – Adjacent Possible. “I’m going to do my best this week to stay on the more ‘positive’ side of our world. It’s easy to go dark (I can easily slip back into this mode… oh, the rage…). Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers. From this article: ‘To me, the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low. The more pressing question is how you build an extended mind architecture that deepens your understanding and expands your creativity, given that there are promising, if slightly chaotic, tools for those tasks on the market right now, at the fingertips of billions of human beings.’ I didn’t know he worked at Google… and here he is talking up Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM)…” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Brian Eno on AI, Art and What Makes Us Human – The Ezra Klein Show – YouTube. “I’m almost certain I have shared this here before. It’s almost a year old. I don’t care. It’s worth a re-share. If you didn’t watch/listen the first time, here’s another chance. If you already consumed this… do it up again. That’s what happened to me this week. It came across my feed… I had forgotten if I had heard this conversation (or not) and decided to dig back in. And I am glad that I did. There’s something really profound in here about this conversartion about art. It’s both innocent and very complex… it’s both deeply meaningful and simple. Sometimes the right content hits you at the right time… this is that. I love listening to Brian Eno speak about art, creativity and invention/innovation (and Ezra Klein makes for great intellectual sparring partner). This one is (more) pure gold.” (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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