On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“You don’t get to be a VP or CEO of a major corporation by being meek. You get there by being a polite sociopath.” —Dave Rahardja
“Have you ever thought about why there aren’t AI tax prep companies coming out of the woodwork? Perfect application: drudgery! Legible rules! Expensive human experts!
It’s because they (rightly) expect that enough of their customers would get in trouble from bad advice that they’d be sued out of existence, if not indicted themselves.
That’s how it should be with all AI apps. Be accountable for what you claim your model does, or don’t ship it.” —@MattMay
“I’m not worried about the AI apocalypse. I’m worried about the ‘VCs subsidize AI tech and sell it at a loss just long enough to make everyone rely on them (AKA ‘disrupting the knowledge worker industry’) before bumping the price up and quality down just like Uber and Amazon and the rest’ apocalypse.” —Alex Chaffee
“I’m coming to think that releasing these [AI] tools was a reckless act with the potential to generate negative externalities we have barely started to imagine.
The threat isn’t rogue superintelligence. It’s bullshit at unprecedented scale, reflected back upon itself and iteratively amplified.” —Carl T. Bergstrom
“Of all the demoralising AI boosterism, the excitement about automating work emails to send is among the saddest. Why? Because it will increase the volume and deplete the remaining value of humans communicating with humans at work in one snappy move without any real understanding of message overload. I would like a new filter for outlook which treats everything by default as junk and selects no more than five a day for actual reading. Then I’m going to treat those five with reverent attention and the rest I will trebuchet into the ocean in large batches on Fridays.” —Kate Bowles
“The ethics of AI aren’t complicated or exciting, it’s just regular old IP theft. They take other people’s writing, jumble it up a bit, and sell it to you. Unethical and irredeemable. That was easy, next question please. All the hype is necessary because OpenAI is banking on convincing lawmakers that they deserve an exception to copyright law.” —Chris Martin
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