Weekly Link Roundup #76
Life comes at ya pretty fast.....
First, let me say like I did on LinkedIn…given the recent layoff news, if you were affected, feel free to find me and connect on LinkedIn. I’m happy to make intros.
In answer to the question about the importance of innovation….now we can say “Must be important, they literally gave a Nobel Prize to people who explain the importance of innovation.” > > Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on How Technology Drives Growth (NYTimes Gift link): “The three economists shared the prize for research that explains the relationship between technological progress and sustained economic growth that has improved living standards, health and quality of life for people around the world. The prize committee said that their work would help ensure that growth was maintained and could be steered in the direction to support humankind.”
This is why your company’s AI strategy is failing: Solid read but this is my fav quote “Layoffs may feel like the obvious shortcut, but decades of research show that slashing headcount first is like burning the furniture to heat the house. It buys a little time, but undermines long-term survival.”
Using Augmentation-Based AI Tool at Work: A Daily Investigation of Learning-Based Benefit and Challenge (Journal of Management paywall): “We theorized and found that, on the one hand, frequent usage of augmentation-based AI during a workday was associated with greater knowledge gain and subsequently better task performance at the end of the workday. On the other hand, using augmentation-based AI frequently also led employees to experience information overload, which in turn impaired their performance and recovery at the end of the workday.”
Generative AI isn’t culturally neutral, research finds: Wow…file this in the Stunningly Obvious File…Yes I’m snarky but I also appreciate the research that confirms or scopes what we knew anecdotally. I also like the vectors they chose…Cognitive Style and Social Orientation….vectors of cultural bias that may not be obvious up front. “The results were clear: Both GPT and ERNIE reflected the cultural leanings of the languages used. In English, the models leaned toward an independent social orientation and analytic thinking. In Chinese, they shifted to a more interdependent social orientation and holistic thinking.”
Surviving the AI Capex Boom: I don’t usually post a lot of financial content but I think this is important. I’ve said before that not only is the technology behind AI changing rapidly but so are the business models. Building an awareness or a literacy around how this market is developing is important for two reasons - 1) cost fluctuations - you need to be able to assess what the downrange cost of any technology is going to be and 2) it highlights the need to build strategies that, to some degree, are technology agnostic. Even companies that seem inevitable today can disappear quickly and the smart org will focus on strategies and capabilities development independent of the underlying tech > > “With the AI arms race transforming Big Tech from asset-light to asset-heavy, a model we find associated with inferior returns, our value-based playbook suggests rotating toward a broader set of AI beneficiaries with lower capital requirements and valuations.” Annnnd just as I type that “Powell says AI is different from dotcom bubble and is major source of economic growth”….. “Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that the artificial intelligence boom is different from the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. “This is different in the sense that these companies, the companies that are so highly valued, actually have earnings and stuff like that,” Powell said, during a news conference following the Fed’s two-day policy meeting.” Did Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Fed, ACTUALLY say “and stuff like that”?
arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated ‘Research’ Papers: This is good news - the review not the slop > > “arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven’t been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues,” according to a press release about the change.”
A Tool That Crushes Creativity - AI slop is winning. By Charlie Warzel: Dang but Charlie can write > > “All of this exacts a fuzzy psychological toll. To live through this moment is to feel that some essential component of our shared humanity is being slowly leached out of the world. Spend enough time online, and you will see that not only is this cheaply rendered synthetic content everywhere; it is quietly shaping culture. It’s become a way that marketers advertise, that politicians produce propaganda. It’s changing how people communicate with one another. Our brains are being sous-vided in machine-made engagement bait like poor Pikachu until they’re tender and succulent enough to fall apart on contact.”
Book Alerts:
Rethinking Educational Theory: Education as Expanding Dialogue (Rethinking Education series) by Rupert Wegerif, Professor of Education, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK
The Theory of Educational Technology: Towards a Dialogic Foundation for Design By Rupert Wegerif, Louis Major
What brain privacy will look like in the age of neurotech: “Nita Farahany: In nearly every aspect of our lives we have entered into digital cages [where] we are tracking nearly everything — our movements, everything we say, everything we do, every online purchasing behavior, every online website that we visit. The biggest risk I see is [the brain] no longer being a safe space — that it suddenly becomes up for grabs, like everything else is up for grabs.”
Three Years After Trial Launch, Ireland Is Making Basic Income for Artists Program Permanent: “The economic return on this investment in Ireland’s artists and creative arts workers is having an immediate positive impact on the sector and the economy overall,” Patrick O’Donovan, minister for culture, communications, and sport, said in a statement.” > > Not to mention the positive impact on Irish arts and culture….see how they can go together?
LLMs show a “highly unreliable” capacity to describe their own internal processes: “In the paper, the researchers put some positive spin on the apparent fact that “current language models possess some functional introspective awareness of their own internal states” [emphasis added]. At the same time, they acknowledge multiple times that this demonstrated ability is much too brittle and context-dependent to be considered dependable. Still, Anthropic hopes that such features “may continue to develop with further improvements to model capabilities. One thing that might stop such advancement, though, is an overall lack of understanding of the precise mechanism leading to these demonstrated “self-awareness” effects.” > > Full Paper: Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models.
Physicists Just Ruled Out The Universe Being a Simulation: Can’t tell if that’s good news or bad news. “Therefore, no physically complete and consistent theory of everything can be derived from computation alone. Rather, it requires a non-algorithmic understanding, which is more fundamental than the computational laws of quantum gravity and therefore more fundamental than spacetime itself.”
America’s New Geological Map Can Tell You Lots About The Ground You Live On: “In August, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) released its most extensive geological map to date. It’s called The Cooperative National Geologic Map, and it provides an interactive look at the geological makeup of the lower 48 states in unprecedented detail. The project is part of the USGS’s National Geologic Map Database program, which provides publicly-accessible archives of US geological survey data. Now, the data has been compiled into a clean, interactive map, making it much more comprehensible for anyone interested in the geological makeup of the land they live on.”
Finally, I just can’t love this story enough in a VERY Cory Doctorow way > > Eight Sleep adds ‘outage mode’ to smart beds after AWS problems left them frozen: “Some smart bed users were quite literally losing sleep over the massive AWS outage on Monday. Eight Sleep’s elevating, temperature-controlling mattress systems were temporarily knocked out of service by Amazon’s server issues, with users on Reddit and X reporting their smart beds were stuck at sweltering temperatures and uncomfortable incline positions. Even our senior reviewer, Victoria Song, woke up on Monday with an Eight Sleep Pod 4 stuck upright due to the outage.”