AI’s Double-Edged Sword: From Cancer Detection to Accountability Dodging
Plus: TikTok’s 35-minute hook, the great privacy divide, and why your next pet might be a robot hamster 🤖
Dear Friend—
Welcome back to another edition of our radical Weekend Briefing. This week we’ll try something new – we added a new section, “Headlines from the Future,” which is “more links, less commentary.” There is just so much we come across each week that we would love to share with you, and it felt a little overwhelming (both for you as the reader and us as the editor) to put it into a longer context.
I’d love to hear what you think. Useful? Good? Bad? Just hit reply and let me know!
Happy reading,
P ツ
P.S. 🧑🏼 The Future of CVs? Here is a fun experiment: Upload your CV to Google’s NotebookLM and let it create a podcast based on your CV. It’s hilarious and sure beats the stodgy CV from yesteryear… Here is mine for inspiration (and hilarity):
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
The Network — It all started with such good intentions: social media was supposed to bring the world together. We all know how this has ended (so far). Add these two reports to your quiver of “social media is the new smoking”: Just 35 min of TikTok can be enough to have you hooked (and addicted). And AI-powered nudes are flooding Telegram.
The Story of Two Cities — On one hand, you have Europe with its increasingly stringent privacy policies; on the other, you have the US, which is increasingly becoming the Wild, Wild West. Companies are taking note and deploying big tobacco’s playbook to ensure their interests are protected.
What Goes Up… — AMAZON, the company heralded for its hard-charging, highly efficient, and no-BS culture, seems to be losing (some) of its way. Disgruntled employees are flocking to LinkedIn to leave comments like this one.
AI vs Cancer — I am mostly skeptical of many of the claimed benefits of current-generation AI systems. Outside of the hype and the fun-but-rather-useless category, product-ready solutions built on LLMs are rare. This news from Harvard Medical School made my ears prick up, though—by using a novel approach to training the model, the system (“CHIEF”) developed a 94% accuracy in cancer detection with the additional benefit of taking patient outcomes into consideration.
Will AI Become The Ultimate Accountability Sink? — An accountability sink is a “structure that absorbs or obscures the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it.” In other words: a “higher power” that you can blame for something not working. The classic cop-out for any corporate serf. With AI being the black box it is, it might very well become the single best (and easiest) excuse for anything not working as it’s supposed to.
Game Over, Pets — Casio, the maker of your favorite pocket calculator from yesteryear, just made your cats and dogs obsolete. Moflin, a robotic and AI-powered “hamster” is coming for fido.
What We Are Reading
⏳ How To Give Busy People The Time To Innovate In today’s fast-paced business environment, how can we give busy people the time to innovate? There is plenty to be done, but a big hint is distinguishing between invention and optimization. @Jane
🔐 The 30-year-old Internet Backdoor Law That Came Back To Bite China-backed hackers have reportedly compromised the wiretap systems of several major U.S. telecom and internet providers. This incident has renewed concerns about the security risks associated with legally mandated backdoors, with experts advocating for more encryption to protect customer data. @Mafe
🤔 LLMs Don’t Do Formal Reasoning - And That Is A Huge Problem Are LLMs really capable of reasoning? Will they ever be? Gary Marcus argues that the evidence still says no. @Jeffrey
🤖 Altera Uses GPT-4o To Build A New Area Of Human Collaboration This company is creating digital humans that can interact and collaborate with people and even experience emotions. @Pedro
👟 How ‘shoe Doping’ Changed Marathon Times Forever – In Ways We Still Don’t Fully Understand Technology has always played a role in pushing the envelope when it comes to sports performance. Remember the shark-skin-inspired swimsuits that were banned at the Olympics because they gave swimmers wearing them an unfair advantage? Carbon plates in running shoes might provide a similar boost for those running in the right shoes. @Pascal
Headlines from the Future
🧑🏼⚕️ Niche market, but at least it’s interesting: Why Surgeons Are Wearing The Apple Vision Pro In Operating Rooms.
🔒 Quantum mostly really only matters (for now) in defense – but there it does big time: Chinese Scientists Report Using Quantum Computer To Hack Military-Grade Encryption.
🍩 GLP-1 type drugs are truly becoming big business: How Long Til We’re All on Ozempic?
🤖 Good reminder to sort out hype from reality: Robot developers keep making it seem like housebots are imminent when they’re decades away.
🌇 It’s mind-boggling how crazy this project truly is: Neom (the Saudi-Arabian giga-city) ‘uses one fifth of world’s steel’.
🏥 It’s very easy to regurgitate the “common wisdom” about why and how healthcare is broken. The reality is, as usual, more complex: Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong.
🔋 Energy consumption is a major issue for AI; this might be a solution: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95% — replaces complex floating-point multiplication with integer addition.
📋 Comprehensive: The 2024 AI Report is here.
🤥 AI is biased, but so are its users: AI Detectors Falsely Accuse Students of Cheating—With Big Consequences.
📉 More voices are warning of an overinflated AI market: AI ‘bubble’ will burst 99 percent of players, says Baidu CEO.
🪫 Unlocking the battery recycling challenge is key to making EVs a truly long-term replacement for ICEs: Mercedes-Benz opens new battery recycling plant that recovers ‘96%’ of battery materials.
🎭 Sites like Amazon are flooded with fake reviews—this might come to an end now: FTC’s rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect.
🛰️ Space might be vast, but it’s not endless: Elon Musk wants to send 30,000 more Starlink satellites into space - and it has astronomers worried.
The Fun Stuff
🥽 Back in the day we called these people “Glassholes”: “Traveling with Apple Vision Pro”
🐥 Ever wondered why birds don’t fall over when they are sleeping? Wonder no more.
🚗 Remember Matchbox? If you, like me, wondered what happened to the once ubiquitous toy, here is your answer.
🧝🏼 There once was the job of a “knocker-upper” – a person whose job it was to wake you up so that you could go to work in the factory.
🧍🏼 Standing more may not reduce cardiovascular disease risk, could increase circulatory disease. Study
📚 Let AI pick your next book for you.