provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
what is ine idea you’d defend like this?
People assume that generative AI will lead to a tsunami of garbage content. I think the opposite problem is more interesting: what if you were drowning in amazing content? What if you’re so inspired and overwhelmed by awe that it’s stressful and addicting and life disorienting?
We don't necessarily need to constantly interact with people “around” us on the web. The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm.
Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they're focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.
If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.
When the Industrial Revolution made it possible to live lives without physical exertion, going to the gym became necessary to stay fit. Equally, now that the AI Revolution has made it possible to live without mental exertion, we need the mental equivalent of gyms to stay sharp.
it’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. You will suffer the same toll financially and psychologically as you bludgeon it into existence. It’s hard to raise the money and to find the right people. So if you’re going to dedicate your life to a business, which is the only way it will ever work, you should choose one... See more