innovation culture

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

The technocracy has evolved radically. Technical knowledge based on science has replaced military and theological knowledge as the source of power, but the distance is not as large as you might think. In modern technocratic power, the distinction between hard-edged scientific knowledge and softer ideological paradigm knowledge is blurry. We have... See more

One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines). Commercial aircraft must couple a high level of performance in some of the most... See more

Here is how Plutarch, classical biographer par excellence, described his attraction to the stories of great men:

We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes

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This essay argues that intelligence is not defined by what a system stores or how it computes, but by what it can access and stage into use under constraints of cost, availability, and time . Storage is cheap. Computation is cheaper still. The real bottleneck—the hard part—is memory access. And where the cost is, intelligence is.

big problems get solved in small rooms.

The default outcome?

Let's grant the assumptions at the start of this post and the above analysis. Then, the post-labour-replacing-AI world involves:

• Money will be able to buy results in the real world better than ever.


• People's labour gives them less leverage than ever before.


• Achieving outlier success through your labour in most or all areas is now

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Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is

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ONE PARTING POINT

I recently watched the film Conclave, about the electing of a new pope. And in the homily before they enter the session there's a really beautiful statement. That the sin the protagonist is most afraid of is certainty because certainty erodes the need for faith. And faith is the critical point of this.

I think the rational SF... See more