The doorbell. The intercom. The elevator. Once upon a time, beginning in the late nineteenth century, pushing the button that activated such devices was a strange new experience. The electric push button, the now mundane-seeming interface between human and machine, was originally a spark for wonder, anxiety, and social transformation.[…] People worried that the electric push button would make human skills atrophy. They wondered if such devices would seal off the wonders of technology into a black box: “effortless, opaque, and therefore unquestioned by consumers.” EPB - 1880-1923.
Enterprise: Mad skills. Data centres: 29% of Ireland’s electricity by 2028. 2.9 billion are offline. Storyfication of companies. Retrotechs trend back.
People: Counting sheep language. Sacred hours - making time. Chinese virtual idols. Where has the innovation gone?
Creative AI: Library of AI images prompts. ChatGPT and Advent of Code. Soon drowning in AI-generated garbage.
AI saw 85,000 eyes, can tell male from female at 87% accuracy - no one knows why (fovea?).Random: McDonald’s hacked its ice-cream machine - a story about slow-moving incumbents (more here). Apps to automate counting stuff.
Yesterday: The “Electric Push Button” was scary. Globalization is dead, says TSMC. Theranos lead got 13-year fraud sentence.
TIL: Heavenbanning, the hypothetical practice of banishing a user from a platform by causing everyone that they speak with to be replaced by AI models that constantly agree and praise them, but only from their own perspective, is entirely feasible with the current state of AI/LLMs [source].
