my story 🚀
🛶 We had a late afternoon canoe ride complete with swimming, rope swings, turtles and watching brave people jump from the bridge.
i’ve been thinking 💭
🤖 I notice a lot of fear-mongering online about AI leading to human doom is making people nervous. It’s clear why: predictions come from people who are held in high esteem by the media, with brand affiliations to today’s hottest tech companies, or from academics or other luminaries. And they are often scary! But one thing I like to keep in mind whenever the wave of online attention coalesces to reinforce a singular narrative: there’s usually more to the story, and the story is not usually the lasting truth of the matter. In this case, there are a couple of aspects to the story that are not as well-covered.
First, there’s money involved! As a rule, when there’s money involved, it drives behavior. Sometimes it’s subtle, often it’s blunt. In this case, there’s a LOT of money involved, and a lot of people telling stories about why they don’t care about it. I don’t really buy it. I think it’s unlikely that the actors with the most impact on the narrative of AI, who have the most control over the business of AI, are not bending their behaviors toward financial outcomes. While they might convince themselves or others that the financial outcomes are just a means to an end, so that they can do more good in the world, I must still conclude “players gonna play”.
Not all doom comes from the commercial AI leaders. What about the others, those who are not positioned to make money from AI lab stock? The long-tenured AI researchers with a consistent message of doom? They are not immune to incentives, though they may not be as obviously pecuniary. Publicity, relevance, ego. In any case, I believe that they believe their prophecies! Yet, I do take comfort in the fact that doomers have always existed and yet never in the history of humanity have they been right.
How does scary AI doom lead to financial gains? The two largest players in the AI game are still closely-held private corporations. (Remember when one used to be a non-profit? 🫠). But they won’t be for long…
Most people haven’t been invited to the party yet! Can you think of a better way to prime the public to buy stock than a daily media deluge that reinforces them as all-powerful? One might think, “well, it’s all-powerful in a bad way,” but I suspect that the good or bad framing is way less important than the powerful framing.
Oh, and one more thing. Take note that the market-leading incumbents are all calling for regulation! Of course, it’s for the benefit of all society so that runaway AI doesn’t destroy us all. But do note that regulation happens to favor market-leading incumbents.
AGI sure seems to be coming. It will have a lot of impact on society and the economy. It might somehow kill us all. But long before then it’s going to be an economic catalyst for the players in the game, and the zeitgeist in the media has always been a lever of that game more so than a neutral marketplace of ideas.
Keep reading, but keep your defenses up!
fun facts 🙌
One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived. “You’ll draw, step by step: a year, a place, a life, each taken at random from real data.” A simple little site that forces you to feel how weird it is that you got *this* timeline and not one of the other of over 100 billion people who have ever lived. ~ learn more
A 3D archive of restrooms. A growing repository of publicly accessible bathrooms. “There is perhaps no space in society that better captures the creativity and impertinence of humans when they know that nobody else is watching.” ~ learn more
Humpbacks keep ruining orca hunts. They’ll sometimes physically shield the prey: “The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below.” Researchers compiled “115 documented interactions” over 62 years, and “only 11 per cent of the time was the prey another humpback.” ~ learn more
Be a sketch artist. A little deduction game where “you are a sketch artist. Use clues from witnesses to draw the suspect and catch them!” There are “Case 1 of 68” so you can burn a lot of time here. ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Two tweets, one lost bird. In 2023, Musk tweeted X would “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” A judge later cited those posts as evidence that X “discontinued the bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo and that it intends not to resume the use of the marks.” ~ learn more
Math drama on X. Mehdi is furious about the “we solved Navier-Stokes” framing, calling it “pure scientific vulgarity” and saying “the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians.” The whole thread is basically: formalizing a forced blowup case in Lean is a compute and software engineering win, not the Clay Millennium Prize claim. ~ learn more
Cyber insurance prices keep falling. NYU Stern researcher Nate Witkin points out: “Insurance rates for cyber risk declined by about 4% globally in Q2 of this year, and that’s actually the 12th consecutive quarter in which they’ve declined.” He frames it as “a plea for level headedness” and asks, “Why are these numbers not moving?” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Smell training for your brain. “The loss of the sense of smell is often one of the first warning signs of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease even up to a decade before there are other diagnosable symptoms.” The article says “90 percent of people with early-stage Parkinson’s and 85 percent of those with early-stage Alzheimer’s have olfactory dysfunction,” which makes the idea of practicing smells feel a lot more practical. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Groupon has a re-founder. While we all stopped paying attention to Groupon, a Czech entrepreneur took it over and rebuilt it with a European team. The CFO describes this turnaround as “we’re buying a house in AAA location, but it’s a complete gut. It is a rebuild from the ground up.” This podcast episode is a very operator-y look at what that rebuild is supposed to mean in practice, coming from the CEO and CFO who also have real skin in the game. ~ learn more
Amazon’s “invented auction participant.”. The FTC and 22 states allege Amazon secretly jacked up ad auction prices for years, while telling advertisers it ran “second price” auctions where winners pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder.” The complaint says internal docs called it “a surcharge hidden in it,” including an “invented auction participant” used to raise what advertisers pay. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Maybe stop chasing protein. A review of 350+ papers argues many sedentary people are overdoing it: “because most people are relatively sedentary, many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need, which probably has negative health consequences.” The authors point to protein restriction shifting metabolism and nutrient signaling, and highlight FGF21 as one possible mechanism. ~ learn more
Aging brains blend memories. The punchline here is that older adults may not just “forget,” they confuse categories. In the study, stronger overlap between learning and recall brain patterns in older adults predicted “confusing items across entirely different categories, like linking a face to a scene when it had actually been paired with an object.” The study is not particularly robust or powerful, but it is interesting. ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
One weird dark matter blip. The LUX-ZEPLIN detector extended its search to higher recoil energies and found a single event it could not explain away as background. “How do you even make sense of one event?” muses Tom Shutt. ~ learn more
Time your wake to a dream. Muse opened a beta for Dream Recall, which aims to catch you mid-dream so you can actually remember what just happened. They frame it simply: “Recall is a timing problem, not a talent.” ~ learn more
Nice recap and historical positioning of AI in its role as a significant yet not fully understood invention right up there with the internal combustión engine, light bulb and Internet.