I often use the analogy of “AI for social good” being like creating a tank first and THEN being like oh let’s see how we can use this tank for “social good.”
Then why not create something other than a tank in the first place?
Scientists follow the state’s endless in warfare.
I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual... See more
“Blockchains have been around for a while,” some will say, “but so many web3 concepts are brand new!” Bullshit, I say to that. Cryptocurrency exchanges have been around for ages—the infamous Mt. Gox launched in 2010. Stablecoins and NFTs have been around since 2014. One of the first well-known DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) was... See more
Why is it that most changes are marginal, but a few, like the Great Oxidation Event, are deeply disruptive? The answer is in asymmetry.When we think of competition, we usually picture symmetric competition. Trees compete on height for sunlight, businesses on price for customers. But you can only grow so tall, or lower prices so much. Competition... See more
You can tune an ITE to be exactly what you need it to be for particular kinds of knowledge work. With a few different plugins, templates, and automations, one ITE can be transformed into many different specialized tools.
All that to say, a lot has changed in the technology world in the past six to twelve years. One only needs to look at Moore’s law to see how this is pretty much built in to the technology world, as once-impossible ideas are rapidly made possible by exponentially more processing power. And yet, we are to believe that as technology soared forward... See more