Shared Links (weekly) March 31, 2024
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Worth Reading – The AI Productivity Illusion
The core question in the post above is pretty simple. Generative AI has helped people finish tasks more quickly and probably completed more tasks, at least when their time is not taken up with cleaning up the slop from poorly generated work, but there haven’t been any widespread economic productivity gains.
What if we’re completing more tasks, but they have no value?
Linked: Political Leaders Should Stop Caring About Twitter
These are some interesting numbers, but as a regular Twitter user, who doesn’t tweet about politics, it also doesn’t surprise me because it’s exactly what I see when I compare “on Twitter” to “off Twitter”. “According to just about every study that has been conducted on the question, Twitter is not representative in the slightest….
Linked: Dutch MPs in video conference with deep fake imitation of Navalny’s Chief of Staff
As I think about this, it occurs to me that a lot of the things that we think would give away deep fake videos are things that happen all the time in Zoom or Teams calls, right? The video being a little slow, or jerky, or not keeping up fluidly with the movement of people on screen, etc. So it could be harder to tell that the “person” on the call with you isn’t really who you think it is, and then we can begin to wonder who it was, and what information they got from being there, pretending to be someone else.
Are we ready for that?
Linked: What Medieval People Got Right About Learning
Scott lays out a good argument for the apprenticeship system, something I’ve seen quite a few people across many fields making a case for. “Apprenticeships were, for a long time, the dominant way of learning professional skills. A master agrees to show you how to perform a useful skill. In exchange, he got a bunch…
