Cam Jones

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In other words, if you can tell a convincing growth story, it's much easier to grow. The corollary, though, is that when a growth company stops growing, when it becomes "mature," it experiences a massive sell-off of its stock, as its share price plummets to a tenth or less of the old "growth" valuation. That's why the biggest tech companies in the ... See more

But that was small potatoes. What Google – and the rest of the tech sector – needed was a massive growth story, a story about how their companies, worth trillions of dollars , could double or triple in size in the coming years. There's a kind of reflexive anti-capitalist critique that locates the drive to tell growth stories in ideology: "endless g... See more

Even companies that are actually profitable (in the sense of bringing in more revenue than it costs to keep the business's lights on) love to juice their stats, and the worst offenders are the Big Tech companies, who reap a vast commercial reward from creating the illusion that they are continuing to grow, even after they've dominated their sector.

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How bad could it be? If you ask the researchers at Anthropic, even if progress stalls out here, current algorithms will automate all white collar work within the next five years: it’s just a matter of collecting the relevant data and spoonfeeding it to the models. In the worst-case scenario, highly repetitive manual labour becomes the last frontier... See more

So why wouldn’t a fledgling AI—even one destined to eventually become very wise and good—do some serious damage before it grows up? Will it be more like a child, learning slowly under our guidance? What will its ‘pulling the wings off flies’ phase look like? Will it treat us as abysmally as we treat other animals?

Even an AI that can think at apprec... See more

A mind with the ability to create new knowledge will necessarily be a universal explainer, meaning it will converge upon good moral explanations. If it’s more advanced than us, it will be morally superior to us: the trope of a superintelligent AI obsessively converting the universe into paperclips is exactly as silly as it sounds.

Back in May, Ted Gioia wrote about the wave of cor­po­ra­tions and celebrities joining Sub­stack. Long­time internet readers will note the clear echo of 2000s blog tri­umphalism and/or 2010s Twitter energy, which is to say: enjoy it while it lasts.

I think it’s a notable that Ted’s post, though it’s titled Sub­stack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days, ... See more