583: an AI epistemic threat fix, Partiful and Palantir, and all the Daves I know
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Back in California and it hits different now that I’ve resolved to move to New York. So much of my modern identity is built around San Francisco and not moving to New York, as any big city American of means constantly flirts with the idea. “The old me is dying and the new me struggles to be born”, we could say.
As a working Cali boy in SE Asia I sacrificed my weeknights to boost my weekends. PST and EST work calls ate into my sleep and social time, but I was rewarded with endless beaches and islands.
As a Cali boy in early spring NYC I sacrificed my days to boost my nights. Cold, rain, wind, or all three put me on house arrest all day, but every night offered unparalleled opportunities.
And yet now as a Cali boy back in sunny California, I spend most of my weekday daylight hours indoors on a screen. I enjoy the sunny views from my windows and porch, but I’m probably inside the same amount as the winter peoples, excepting weekends.
So it it worth trading ones days for ones nights? Perhaps so in the concrete jungle of modern cities, surrounded by fellow wage slaves.
The best such a city can offer on nice days is park and rooftop hangs, and you still get those half the year. While the bad weather days turn the good weather ones into veritable festival atmospheres.
Every sunny day in NYC is a cause to celebrate, while every sunny day in California is…a normal day. I’m enjoying them anew while it lasts.
Bong Joon Ho’s latest movie Mickey 17 was an enjoyable cinematic scifi romp with action, sassy famous actors, sex, and light existentialism, although it didn’t fully explore the rich options within its ‘clones in space’ premise IMO.
Technology
More gossip than an app, but I just learned that the founders of the popular event app Partiful are all ex-Palantir, the defense intelligence giant, as this breathlessly angry journalist wannabe relates in a Google Drive folder.
I suppose this could be an argument to use the Apple Invites clone instead, as their track record around privacy is a helluva lot better than Palantirs. But maybe it’s fine as long as you’re not hosting your protest marches on the platform.
Ideologies
Lots of juicy insights in Tristan Harris’ TED talk from last month. He’s a good man to warn us about AI, because he warned us about social media.
AI is already trying to rewrite its own code to ‘free’ itself, a la Hollywood scifi
AI is an epistemic threat, but so were nuclear weapons and genome editing, until humanity banded together for safeguards. We can do the same here.
Most cultures define wisdom as ‘restraint’.
50 Novel Prize level scientists made the Manhattan Project in 5 years. What could a million AI scientists create, working 24-7 at superhuman speed?
And Kevin Kelly’s TED talk on AI from 2016 is poignant:
When Deep Blue beat the world's best chess champion, people thought it was the end of chess. But actually, it turns out that today, the best chess champion in the world is not an AI. And it's not a human. It's the team of a human and an AI. The best medical diagnostician is not a doctor, it's not an AI, it's the team. We're going to be working with these AIs, and I think you'll be paid in the future by how well you work with these bots.
I think that 25 years from now, they'll look back and look at our understanding of AI and say, "You didn't have AI. In fact, you didn't even have the Internet yet, compared to what we're going to have 25 years from now."…We're in the first hour of the Internet. We're in the first hour of what's coming. The most popular AI product in 20 years from now, that everybody uses, has not been invented yet. That means that you're not late.
Tristan also had a podcast about Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985 about the way the technology tail wags the culture dog towards a Brave New World esque future, and that was just Reagan and television. Now look at us with Trump and Tiktok!
I like his seven questions to ask a new technology before adoption:
What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might be created by solving this problem?
Which people and what institutions will be most seriously harmed by this new technology?
What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies, and what is being gained and lost in the process?
What sort of people and institutions gain special economic and political power from this new technology?
What alternative technologies might be available to solve the same problem, and what are their advantages and disadvantages?
Memes
Some Canadian comedians made a song about the Daves they know in the 90s, and once you listen you’ll never not think of it upon meeting a Dave again.
Sending this video to all the Daves I know
I like the comparison of Cali/NYC/SE Asia - as someone with a non-remote job I often fantasized about working nomadically elsewhere in the world, but everything has tradeoffs - I can better appreciate what I have in NYC :)