The choices we make today shape our world tomorrow.
Author mpescePosted on What would you do if you lost your job to an AI? Would you even know? It happened to me – and I didn’t learn the truth for six months. In the aftermath I recognised how my work needed to change. That became the core of ‘Building Resistance’, a set of practices that help us focus on the most human elements of our work. Leaning into those – in this episode, you’ll learn how – makes it harder to get automated into oblivion.
Author mpescePosted on Can a computer program a computer as well as a human being can? Artificial intelligence enabled a quantum leap in the quality of the tools programmer use to write code – but they’re delicate. Push them too hard and they break. Even when they work they can write reams of code that no human can make heads or tails of. John Allsopp joins us to investigate whether programmers will soon become obsolete – or whether they’ll kept around to clean up AI-generated messes. Is AI making the discipline of software engineering any better – or is that just a story we’re telling ourselves?
An attorney in California just got whacked with a USD $10,000 fine for submitting a briefing with hallucinations to a court.
Simon Willison’s most excellent blog is here.
Author mpescePosted on Whenever fellow futurist and longtime friend Rob Tercek and I get together, we go crazy deep on the future: What happens when lazy humans outsource their thought process to machines? You get a society that vibes its way into a blurry, sub-optimal future. The surge of slop means that AI is creating more work for humans instead of stealing our jobs. I join Rob on his podcast The Futurists to cut through the hype and the skepticism about modern tech, calling out AI mediocrity and reminding us why human learning remains painful. Topics include: ChatGPT psychosis, why we need a generation of PhDs to revisit eternal questions about Truth, the perpetual dawn of AGI, what happens to the political economy when the populace is siloed into bubbles, why Kremlin propagandists produce propaganda for machines instead of people, why experience cannot be generated, why autocracies need accurate data, and the real reason why people get lost in untruth. Just some light listening for you.
Big thanks and more at The Futurists podcast – https://thefuturists.com
Author mpescePosted on Google’s new NotebookLM digests documents to create AI summaries, and provides an incredible new way to search a vast set of information. One little throwaway feature became a viral hit – “Audio Overview”, which creates a ‘podcast’ featuring two clever, chipper – and entirely synthetic – personas, engaging in a ‘deep dive’ on the content within NotebookLM. In the spirit of Halloween, we uploaded the scripts for the first four episodes of Series 2024 – and NotebookLM rose to the occasion. Is this the future of podcasting? And — HAVE I JUST BEEN PUT OUT OF A JOB?
Author mpescePosted on The pandemic permanently broke the link between work and place. In the aftermath we’ve rejiggered everything connected to work-life balance – in favour of life. This means we’ve stumbled into a new reality: the ‘four-day week’ is a reality for most office workers – even if no one wants to name it. How did this happen? Have a listen and find out.
Author mpescePosted on Atlassian’s ‘work futurist’ Dom Price and resilience expert Sally Dominguez guide us through a new world of work, post-pandemic. Then we speak with two leaders at the coalface, both finding unique paths to help their staff thrive in a world of work that looks nothing like what any of us have ever known.
Brought to you by Oracle.
Read the paper in Nature that explores how videoconferencing wrecks group creativity.
Author mpescePosted on Pretty much every fact you’ll ever need for any problem you have to solve can now be accessed almost instantly through any smartphone. What does that mean about how we learn? And what about the places where we learn – schools and libraries? If everything is available everywhere, why go anywhere in search of knowledge? State Library of Victoria CEO Kate Torney explores why libraries have a future that remembers the past, yet looks out on a future where access to knowledge in only a part of the story.
