Apple intelligence and AI maximalism — Benedict Evans
Apple has showed a bunch of cool ideas for generative AI, but much more, it is pointing to most of the big questions and proposing a different answer - that LLMs are commodity infrastructure, not platforms or products.
Trying to make AI do my job revealed a vast infrastructure of cheap tricks and middlemen that have been trying to game Google Search for more than a decade.
Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote:
I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening.
There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish
Vanessa Andreotti: "Hospicing Modernity and Rehabilitating Humanity" | The Great Simplification 125
(Conversation recorded on March 25th, 2024)
Show Summary:
In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and Latinx researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture. Whether you refer to it as the metacrisis, the polycrisis, or - in Nate’s terms - the human predicament, Vanessa brings a unique framing rooted in indigenous knowledge and relationality to aid in understanding, grieving, and building emotional resilience within this space. What does it mean to live and work within systems that are designed to fail, embedded in an aimless culture? How do we as individuals steady ourselves and create inner strength before engaging with such harrowing work? Importantly, what could education look like if founded in the principles of intergenerational knowledge transmission and emotional regulation, that are centered on our collective entanglement with the Earth?
About Vanessa Andreotti:
Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti is the Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. Vanessa has more than 100 published articles in areas related to global and climate education. She has also worked extensively across sectors internationally in projects related to global justice, global citizenship, Indigenous knowledge systems and the climate and nature emergency. Vanessa is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism, one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and one of the designers of the course Facing Human Wrongs: Climate Complexity and Relational Accountability, available at UVic through Continuing Studies.
For show notes, including referenced articles and additional resources:
https://thegreatsimplification.squarespace.com/episode/125-vanessa-andreotti
00:00 - Intro
1:52 - The House of Modernity
16:34 - Hospicing the House of Modernity
22:56 - Theory of Change
31:49 - Affective Responses
43:55 - Healing Trauma
54:42 - Relational Intelligence
59:11 - Metabolical Literacy
1:04:59 - Dopamine Dependence
1:07:25 - Depth Education
1:09:27 - Reception with Young People
1:14:38 - How Do You Keep Going?
1:20:22 - Personal Advice
1:28:34 - What Would You Do with a Magic Wand?
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