We've published another essay over at FIELD STATION entitled Governance Is Not a Dashboard. This post is a TL;DR of it, explaining how applying the Viable System Model (VSM) is even more achievable in a world of AI agents.
…I'm going to use the term 'affordance' in what follows, and I know from experience over the years that people misunderstand this term:
In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning; it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.
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I'm really pleased at how this essay by Tom and me for FIELD STATION turned out. It's about decision making in the AI era, using some physics metaphors:
One of the first questions we ask new clients is "how do you make decisions?"
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I'm not sure that pejorative terms such as AI 'slop' and AI 'psychosis' are helpful. Similarly, neither is 'cognitive surrender'. What's interesting is how similar or different over-reliance on a particular tool or workflow is for a particular individual. In that way, I think AI use can and should be considered in the same realm as 'addictions' to things like betting and algorithmic timelines.
…Delighted at this, especially the bit I've highlighted in bold:
OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, has lost its legal challenge against the refusal to register the trademark "OPENAI" at the European Union's General Court.
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Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks discusses how, as a technology, AI is used differently depending on predispositions:
The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”
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What I like about this post is that it brings a bit of nuance to proceedings.
Not every audience group or individual user will care about the provenance of the content they’re consuming. It also depends on a case-by-case basis; sometimes AI-assistance changes everything versus other times, it barely registers.
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There is a certain type of person who fetishises human creativity, which I see as a lowkey version of the great man theory of history. It's almost as if they've a) never heard of Brian Eno's idea of scenius, nor b) understood that "we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us".
…I'm not sure my responses to this series of 29 questions warrant the tag 'true believer' but I haven't looked into the methodology of this 'AI Compass'.
Essentially my position is that AI is more consequential and useful than things like Blockchain, that it should be better regulated, and that it allows most people to do things they weren't able to do before.
…I came across discode.ai this morning, which describes itself like this:
You choose the rhythm, not the algorithm. Ecological, private, true and smart AI — built in Austria.
While I initially thought that it was a bit odd that a EU-based startup positioning themselves like this only allowed you to sign in via Google, thankfully you can provide a user name and password and just use that.
…This video, Will AI destroy the economy? from Gary's Economics is a must watch. I viewed it on 1.5x speed and it's a really useful, accessible message.
I asked my Little Robot Friend to create an overview with timestamps for those who aren't so fond of watching videos:
…Not a playlist and not a person — an autonomous music intelligence that digs the underground, listens to every record, and mixes them live, choosing the next correct track in real time and telling you why.
This is pretty cool. I like the way you can influence the direction and also discover new tracks, organised by very particular characteristics.
…This is an interesting idea: “co/core is a place where people share the compute they already own to run AI for each other, instead of renting from a handful of giant providers.” Mac only for the moment, but the main innovation is building a standard for being able to share compute power.
…Prof. Kenneth Payne (King's College London) has published a paper entitled AI Arms and Influence: Frontier models exhibit sophisticated reasoning in simulated nuclear crises and summarised it on his blog. It's game theory on steroids.
…Ky Decker has written a really interesting post about quitting his tech job. Yes, the proximal cause is AI, but once you get past that, there some interesting points on productive friction, values, and burnout.
No matter how rapidly technology changes, I am coalescing around some core beliefs:
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This post very much goes with my previous one about embodied cognition. Although we shouldn't allow people to wield capricious power based on "gut feel", nor should we accept the outsourcing of decision-making to LLMs. Especially when it's done in the way outlined below, by people unaware of the way that commercial full-stack AI tools are built to validate whoever is using them.
…The Head of Open Source at Sentry, a really well-known (and seemingly well-loved) guy by the name of Chad Whitacre, has "retired from tech" to go and work at Home Depot. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, but the way he did it was pretty awesome.
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