AI Fails to Deliver, Robots Take Over Dentistry, and More Tech Insights
From unsettling dental droids to the enshitification of cloud computing - this week's tech news has us both excited and unnerved.
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
AI Fails to Deliver — At least when it comes to the financial markets, investors are wary of claims that billions of dollars invested in AI will turn into many more billion dollars in revenue, thus increasing stock prices. The result? Investors are penalizing big tech’s stocks — big time.
Robots Are Coming For Your Pearly Whites — Robots have been supporting (and partially performing) surgeries for a while now. The latest advancement involves robots being used for dental procedures. Admittedly, this sounds like a story from my personal nightmares.
Don’t Trust Dr. GPT — Not all that surprising, but please don’t trust ChatGPT with your medical diagnosis. It’s about as bad as Googling your symptoms.
A Rare Glimpse Into Tesla’s Self-Driving Brain — A group of hackers managed to break into Tesla’s self-driving software by using salvaged (read: crashed) Teslas, and what they found isn’t pretty. Maybe think twice when you take your hands off the steering wheel next time?!
Robocars Improve Traffic — In other news, even a relatively modest amount of autonomous cars on the road helps improve traffic flow for everyone by quite a margin.
EVs Are Taking Off — More than 27% of all new cars being registered in the UK are EVs now, with BMW taking the crown for the most cars being sold.
The Price-Component of the Enshitification — There once was a world where we all used cheap, hyper-scalable, and always available cloud services. Our media gets streamed to our devices, and taxis are a long-gone memory. What we got instead are Ubers, which are as expensive as taxis were, streaming that looks like (and costs as much as) cable TV, and ever-growing cloud service bills. In the end, we just can’t have nice things, it seems.
Another Psych-Study Gets Debunked — Last week we mentioned that the claim that judges give harsher sentences when they are hungry is BS. This week, let’s do the same with the famous marshmallow challenge (what is it with food all the time?). It turns out that kids who couldn’t resist the temptation of stuffing their face with marshmallows when presented with the opportunity do not turn out to be worse than their delayed-gratification brethren.
What We Are Reading
🧠 MIT Neuroscience Reveals The Mystery Behind Aesthetic Chills. Here’s The Real Reason You Get Goosebumps Goosebumps Decoded: MIT’s breakthrough on emotional intensity and cognition. @Jane
🌳 Scientists Discovered An Entirely New Type Of Wood There’s hardwood and there’s softwood. And there’s something-in-between-wood, and it is awesome. It grows fast and stores a lot of carbon, making it highly effective for carbon sequestration. @Mafe
🤝 What Sets Genius Teams Apart The most elusive quality of top-performing executive teams might be the ability to manage almost constant generative tension in the service of large-scale goals. @Jeffrey
🎯 “Do Not Hallucinate”: Testers Find Prompts Meant To Keep Apple Intelligence On The Rails Developing Gen AI so that it serves its purpose requires that purpose to be specifically defined. The larger, more flexible, and more diverse the use cases, and thus the capability of the system become, the harder it is to narrowly define it. Apple is trying to be very specific about the ways in which its new intelligence ought to operate. @Julian
💸 Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit? Despite the massive investment in generative AI technology, the resulting benefits and returns have been disappointingly minimal so far. @Pedro
🌍 Who Killed The World? This beautiful interactive website explores how yesteryear’s science fiction differs from today’s future worlds and what we can learn from the differences. @Pascal
The Fun Stuff
🧑🏼🌾 The robots are coming for your backyard farm. For the low, low price of only $2,795.
🧬 When our ancestors moved from the African continent to colder climates, a gene alteration allowed us to deal with the cold.