The illusion persists because there’s so much money in it. Back in 2016, Ben Thompson wrote that Google’s AI efforts were at odds with its business model: “If a user doesn’t have to choose from search results, said user also doesn’t have the opportunity to click an ad, thus choosing the winner of the competition Google created between its... See more
This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth... See more
In Walden , his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of ... life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it.
Regardless, what becomes important is the ability for *any* media to find the humans to enjoy it. And so, there’s likely a future inflection point where having more humans on your project is actually beneficial because it means you start off with a higher likelihood of it being shared. If the extreme becomes that we may be able look at anything for... See more