“My every walk in the city has turned into a hunt for stickers, which are actually different in every neighborhood. This area of culture exists as if in a different dimension. It is simultaneously omnipresent and ‘invisible’ to most pedestrians. A few of them are commercial in nature, others are tags, but most feature cryptic signs or messages that deny any understanding by outsiders. “Who makes these stickers, and why? Sometimes it feels like there is a ‘dialog’ between stickers but mostly they appear indifferent to each other.” - TAON
People: The “endineer” for end of life products. Do well-being apps harm us? The tyranny of time. Building a minimum viable community of practice (MVCoP). Hypnovels - to sell books.
Society: Polycrisis analyses (Cascade - PDF). Natural capital as stock options.
Futures batch: Ricard view on 2050. Atlantic council view of 2034. School of International Futures for systemic foresight in govs (PDF). Forecast in neighbourhoods (PDF). Manifesto for the Ministry of Imagination (and PDF). BCG take on the future of work.
AI: Business models for AI - are there? Lethal weapon control?
do. And:If you debate with an AI, they are 87% more likely to persuade you to their assigned viewpoint than if you debate with an average human
GPT-4 helps people reappraise a difficult emotional situation better than 85% of humans, beating human advice-givers on the effectiveness, novelty, and empathy of their reappraisal.
GPT-4 generates startup ideas that outside judges find to be better than those of trained business school students.
149 actors playing patients texted live with one of 20 primary care doctors or else Google's new medical LLM. The AI beat the primary care doctors on 28 out of 32 characteristics, and tied on the other four, as rated by human doctors. From the perspective of the "patients," the AI won on 24 of 26 scales of empathy and judgement.
We fear AI will become the servant that the Sorcerer’s Apprentice creates (as embodied in the famous paperclip maximizer). It’ll follow an instruction relentlessly, destroying everything and anyone in its way to achieving its goal. AGI, on the other hand, is ... pitiless, tireless, and inimical. The mythopoetic archetype of such a being is the devil—or, which could be worse, the incomprehensible and arbitrary Greek or Norse gods.
