Substrate

I can dismiss a lot of pronouncements by Big Tech companies as simply press releases trying to invent the future. But attempting to ascribe consciousness to AI models pisses me off, particularly as the untold riches being poured into AI development could be used to lessen the suffering of real people and animals that we know for sure experience it.

I really value this point by Joe Burns because it's counter-intuitive and controversial:

Thinking has no inherent value.

Bad news for strategists, because we bloody love thinking.

Strategists like thinking about things. Then thinking about why we thought those things. Then putting the thoughts into a framework or an infographic type of thing so other people can think about them too.

But the point of thinking should be getting somewhere. Sometimes thinking moves you forward. You’re grappling with something.

Sometimes it just creates more thinking. You’re in the tangle.

Where you want to be, and where the best stuff happens is where you’re making progress but you’re barely thinking at all. That’s flow.

In this magical state, residual thinking is compressed into instinct.

You just sort of know what to do. You have ‘The Knack’.

Unfortunately, it takes a lot of thinking to create that flow state. That’s why the best type of thinking is to think about how you can think less.

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For my MA in Modern History back in 2002-2003 I spent a long time in the Tyne & Wear archives working towards my dissertation: 'The Origin and Application of Educational Ideas in Mid to Late Victorian England'. None of what I was looking at was digitised, but if it were, imagine how quickly I could have found things using AI.

In my first note on OrgLens I asked whether an AI agent could diagnose an organisation using Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). The answer was yes, more or less.

The reports were written for someone like me using terms such as System 3*, algedonic channels, and requisite variety. Those terms can be useful if you know VSM, but most people who might benefit from an organisational health check do not, and shouldn't need to.

Systems thinking is a way of looking at organisations as sets of connected parts rather than as collections of individuals or departments. The Viable System Model, or VSM, is one approach within it. It asks whether an organisation has the parts it needs to keep going: people doing the work, ways of coordinating that work, checks on whether the work is happening, people looking ahead, and a way of agreeing what the organisation is for.

A few months ago, I published a note about installing Android on my Rabbit r1. This post is about going a step further to create carrot:

A voice-first home screen for the Rabbit r1. Hold the side button, ask something, let go, and hear the answer. Point the camera and ask "what's this?". Set reminders, keep lists, and check the weather and your day, all by voice, on a black and orange screen made for the r1.

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I take far fewer photos than I used to, which is ironic because the cameras on the phone in my pocket are the best I've ever had. Maybe something like this could help?

Note: the competition mentioned happened five years ago, and yes, the title of this post is a play on the name of Bad Bunny's excellent 2025 album)

With my last zine, as well as the 40-page professionally-printed version, I also included a smaller, home-printed zine from a sheet of A4.

I'm planning on doing similar with my next one, and this post is giving me some creative ideas, as are these resources.