The Magnificent Bribe — Real Life
Half a century ago, Lewis Mumford developed a concept that explains why we trade autonomy for convenience
Technology
The Other Bubble
Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom.
In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team
This is where your smartphone battery begins
Workers, including children, labor in harsh and dangerous conditions to meet the world’s soaring demand for cobalt, a mineral essential to powering electric vehicles, laptops, and smartphones, according to an investigation by The Washington Post.
The Map is Eating the Territory: The Political Economy of AI
It's all driven by who gets what
Rather than appealing to some vague notion of the awesomeness of progress, or the malignity of technology, we want, collectively, to coordinate on paths of technological development that will have spread benefits as broadly as possible, while mitigating for, or compensating for the costs.
LLMs should not be viewed as a substitute for high quality human generated knowledge. They should instead be viewed as an obligate complement to such knowledge - a means of making it more useful, which doesn’t have much independent worth without it.
What I Learned About AI in 2023
A Very Niche Foresight Report