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…
- I Know What You Think of Me – Tim Kreider – The New York Times. “Last week, for example, I got a calendar invite that included an AI note about a very large money transfer that had nothing to do with me. Like, big enough that it made me question my career and reconsider a close friend’s personal wealth. I let him know via Signal. He laughed, and then deleted our chat history. This sort of thing will become increasingly common. We are all about to find out lots more about one another through public disclosures, leaks, hacks, and automation accidents as we rely on AI. This is a 12-year-old article about accidentally being copied on a mail that says unpleasant things about you. Read it in the context of today’s technology, which goes far beyond an accidental cc:.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- The Death Of Educational Content On YouTube – Fern – YouTube. “Get ready to get mad. Fern is a science channel on YouTube with 5.4 million subscribers and a very distinctive style: Lots of animations, modeled in Blender, to explain complex concepts. Which also makes them prime targets for AI-generated clones that take mundane Wikipedia articles and turn them into nearly-real short takes. Proud you don’t doomscroll? Devoted to educational content instead? Engagement hacking comes for us all. Like any good science channel, Fern investigated. They even took some of the courses offered by these slop-cannons-turned-arms-dealers. Watch this whole thing, and see the undertakers of the Dead Internet theory.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Brain Scientists Finally Discover The Glue That Makes Memories Stick For A Lifetime – Simon Makin – Scientific American. “I’m often struck by a question that I can’t answer, and that seems so overwhelmingly important and baffling that I can’t believe I haven’t spent my life thinking about it. For instance: What exactly is a memory? How is one made? Why do some last and others not? Well, since the 70s the hypothesis was that memories are stored by strengthening connections between neurons, a process called long-term potentiation (LTP), later found to be enabled by a protein called PKMzeta. But PKMzeta only lasts a couple of hours, and how does it know which synapse to connect to? New research suggests that a different protein, KIBRA, is part of the process, marking the synapse where the neurons connected (my head already hurts). I’m gonna write this out for my own benefit: when you learn something new, there is electrical activity between neurons connecting at a synapse. A single neuron has 10,000 synapses, and only a subset ‘fire’ when you learn something. The KIBRA (kidney and brain expressed adaptor) protein attaches to the activated synapses, marking them as ‘learning’. Then the neuron makes PKMzeta, that binds to the KIBRA, and enhances/strengthens the synapse connection. Both PKMzeta and KIBRA degrade within a day-ish, but the PKMzeta/KIBRA pair ‘recruits’ new molecules to replace themselves, and this renewal is what creates memory persistence. So, if the PKMzeta/KIBRA complex degrades, the neuron pairing at the synapse isn’t maintained, and memories disappear. BUT! some memory types (eg fear/location) don’t use PKMzeta/KIBRA but some other (likely similar) mechanism (confession: AI helped me work through all that). Anyway, I have never before asked, ‘gee, what is the mechanism by which memories are made,’ and if you ask me in three weeks, and I can’t remember, we’ll both know to blame my sub-par PKMzeta/KIBRA pairing.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Confessions Of An Unrepentant Slop Snob – Charity Majors. “There’s a newsletter I subscribe to because it’s filled with good info on my industry, and some original reporting. But it also features AI-slop tells like ‘load-bearing’ and once I hit one of those, I usually stop reading. At the same time, if I’m trying to get the info, why should I care if there’s a spare ‘saying the quiet part out loud’ thrown in there by Claude? Charity Majors has some (reasonable) thoughts on the matter.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Who Gets to Define the Rules for AI? – Aidan Gomez – Cohere. “Well… it’s been a week in the world of aritficial intelligence and technology. Cohere (as you know… but the other readers may not) is a Canadian company (also) at the forefront of AI. This week, in Montreal, we had over 10,000 people converging to meet and discuss the AI convergence at the All In AI event, where Aidan Gomez (Cohere’s Co-Founder and CEO) was front and center on stage and working the trade show floor. And his perspective was… shall we say ‘different’ from the ‘stop… slowdown… pause… push it faster’ rhetoric that are the loudest in the news these days. Who to believe? Who should lead? Who should regulate… and how? Read this for a perspective that might surprise you (and is aligned to what I have been thinking, writing and speaking about lately… that is not fast vs. slow… it’s about fast vs. control)… Aidan’s main thoughts? AI rules should not be decided by a few powerful Silicon Valley companies alone. Instead, safety standards must be based on science, transparency, and independent testing accessible to all developers. This approach protects society by ensuring fair, evidence-based regulation and preventing market control by a small group… makes sense… but is this how things will flow?” (Mitch for Alistair).
- After Work, We’ll Have Each Other – Clara Collier – Asterisk. “Another topic that is being hotly debated in our current live version of The Matrix and whatever timeline we happen to find ourselves in these days. We spent decades optimizing work into processes and productivity. We spent even more time shifting the work to a large swath of the population being able to work with our noggins… and not our hands/backs from our porhces or a cafe. We moved from full time office work to tasks, projects and remote. Even before AI… the shifts were big and (like everything else) have tradeoffs. Take for example, this video clip of OpenAI’s Sam Altman thinking about what life for us might be like if AI can provide (thanks to David Usher for bringing this clip to my attention). But there’s something bigger here that we don’t talk about lot about. Work was once deeply tied to social relationships, not just those tasks or projects. People get a lot of status, respect and dignity through their work… even if the work itself isn’t all that meaningful. This article thinks that the future may return to valuing human connection and social roles over traditional employment… will that be forced by AI… a reaction to it… interesting to think about…” (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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Mitch Joel Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.