Understanding Media

We’ve written a lot about AI’s impact on work over the past few months, but I liked an example Derek Thompson wrote about last week. Excerpt here:

One way to think about AI’s effect on workers is asking the question: Is artificial intelligence a tractor or a spreadsheet?

When we invented tractors, the population of horses on farms plummeted, because

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Media never dies, it only morphs. The old way can only be understood as “compression” — the logical consequence of filtering ideas and people and stories through a tightly constrained broadcast feeding tube. What comes out feels like baby food. The late night talk format will surely be a casualty of media’s democratic revolution. Podcasts and their... See more

“They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no

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