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Compliance is the New American Dream
Compliance is the New American Dream
How risk aversion has shaped our schools, our government, and our global standing
One student at ASU said she viewed the humanities as a hobby that “you have to be affluent to take it on.”
The result is a generation of workers trained to anticipate what’s expected, not to invent what’s needed.
How do you cultivate curiosity? By embracing things beyond data and numbers (which again, are gorgeous in their own right) and by allowing people to explore things beyond optimization.
We don't need more people optimizing. We need people who can think. This means revaluing curiosity across institutions. It means reinvesting in education that rewards exploration, not just performance.
#work#compliance#trumpadministration#education#via:austin#usa#foreignpolicy
·kyla.substack.com·
Compliance is the New American Dream
The Era Of The Business Idiot
The Era Of The Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The article revealed that — assume we believe him, and this wasn’t merely a thinly-veiled advert for Microsoft’s AI tech — Copilot consumes Nadella’s life outside the office as well at work. He likes podcas
I am deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs his life in this way, but if he does, Microsoft’s board should fire him immediately.
Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company "a good place to work," not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.
We go to college as a means of getting a job after college using the grades we got in college, rendering many students desperate to get the best grades they can versus "learn" anything
Remote work terrifies the Business Idiot, because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to, well...work.
The Business Idiot's reign is one of speciousness and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance and of theft.
And because the Business Idiot's career has been built on only knowing exactly enough to get by, they don't dig into Large Language Models any further than hammering away at ChatGPT and saying "we must put AI in everything now."
The media, captured by other Business Idiots, has become poisoned by power, deferring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity and intelligence than anyone that works for them.
They don’t want to plan their kids’ birthday parties. They don’t want to research things. They don’t value culture or art or beauty. They want to skip to the end, hit fast-forward on anything, because human struggle is for the poor or unworthy.
This piece is not just 13,000 words long — it’s the result of the 800,000 or more words I wrote before it, the hundreds of stories I’ve read in the past, the hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge and, yes, growing with the work itself.
#edzitron#business#generativeai#capitalism
·wheresyoured.at·
The Era Of The Business Idiot
Remarks on AI from NZ
Remarks on AI from NZ
He seems to expect something akin to AGI eventually.
Animals have intelligences of many different kinds. We’re used to thinking of them as being less intelligent than we are, and that’s usually not wrong, but it might be better to think of them as having different sorts of intelligence, because they’ve evolved to do different things.
I’d be putting my energies into building AIs whose sole purpose was to predate upon existing AI models by using every conceivable strategy to feed bogus data into them, interrupt their power supplies, discourage investors, and otherwise interfere with their operations.
Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined.
And when the competition is in the realm of intelligence, that means preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price.
#generativeai#nealstephenson#education
·nealstephenson.substack.com·
Remarks on AI from NZ
How to Not Get Poisoned in America
How to Not Get Poisoned in America
The minute I saw that Robert Kennedy Jr., a notorious disease-loving health crank, was going to be responsible for the nation’s health—and the health of its...
I'm out of patience with American individualism. Either we're in this together and we're a community, or we aren't.
when we protect the least of us, we protect all of us. Even if we don't want to be, we are actually in this together. Eugenics is just garbage anyway.
this idea that all of us—rich or poor, young or old, informed or uninformed—have a fundamental right to go to the store and buy food for ourselves and for our families that won't kill us and make us sick
Our government should protect us in an every person way, and we should stand together in an every person way.
#interview#foodsafety#journalism#trumpadministration#fda
·buttondown.com·
How to Not Get Poisoned in America