AI's Thin Wisps of Tomorrow: Hype, Hope, and Hamburger Helpers
From robo-taxis to AI-designed shoes, discover how artificial intelligence is reshaping our world—and why your coffee habit might just save your life.
The Thin Wisps of Tomorrow
AI-Hype versus Reality: What’s this? Everybody talks about it, but nobody does it. No, it’s not Gen Z’s sex life, it’s AI. Despite everybody and their grandma being on the AI hype train, very few companies are actually deploying AI in production environments. It’s just too complex, not reliable enough, there isn’t enough data, and a million other reasons…
AI-Driven Discovery: AI plays an increasingly significant role in scientific discovery. Google's DeepMind has already turbocharged drug discovery, and now a UK-based firm has used AI to develop a new rare-earth-free magnet 200 times faster than before. The firm's specially trained AI analyzed more than 100 million rare-earth-free material compositions, identifying the most promising candidates for testing and development. And as we were just typing out these sentences, some former Meta engineers launched an AI-powered molecule discovery company. The future looks bright…
AI-Driven Displacement: The first mistake many of us made was to think that technology comes after blue-collar jobs. It turns out that becoming a plumber or carpenter is a sound career choice in 2024. What AI is really after are the fairly high-paid freelancer jobs. Who needs a copy editor when a simple prompt can do the job equally well, or even better? Next on AI’s displacement list: Bankers and Apple’s factory workers.
AI-Driven Development is Getting Good: The latest version of Anthropic’s frontier foundational model Claude 3.5 is really good at coding. Here are some examples. And here is radical ID community member Angel Grimalt’s use of Claude to create a 2x2 scenario matrix.
AI-Driven Driving: Somewhat underreported, Google spin-off Waymo just dropped the waitlist and allows everyone to pick one of their autonomous robo-taxis in San Francisco. We think this is a fairly big step for the whole autonomous vehicle space.
The Bots Are Coming: Remember the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal. The website, which had its user database hacked and exposed, offered an online portal for people to cheat on their partners. The often overlooked insight was that the site made extensive use of AI bots (70,000 of them, using fake user profiles) to lure men into paying a membership fee. Over 11 million conversations happened between gullible men and the chatbots. More than anything else, the Ashley Madison incident might provide an interesting glimpse into our (admittedly sad and dark) future of human/bot interaction (or is this bot/human?).
Tech Politics: The European Union has intensified its battle with US tech firms, and Silicon Valley is fighting back. Apple's announcement to withhold many of its AI features has shifted the battle from the company to the consumer, as they appear to be the only ones losing in this conflict. European regulators have set their sights on more than just Apple. Microsoft is also embroiled in its own struggle, as it faces scrutiny over bundling its Teams collaboration software with the Office productivity suite.
Solar is Ascendant: By now, it should be common knowledge that renewable energy sources are on the rise and often outcompeting their fossil fuel counterparts. Here is a summary of the state of solar energy, as reported by The Economist. It can’t come fast enough—as we seem to gobble up all the energy we can get to feed our AI overlords.
The Shoes Are Coming: Move over Crocs, zee Germans are coming! It's fascinating to see this finally emerge. We discussed custom-designed and 3D-printed shoes at Singularity University around 10 years ago, but the technology was never quite good enough to support a semi-mass manufacturing process. Now might be the time.
Please Don't Litter: Using satellites to track floating trash in the oceans is a reality now, something we have discussed for some time. To illustrate the problem: We dump a full truckload of trash into the oceans every 60 seconds. It's high time to track down the polluters and take action.
Please Don’t Die: Surprisingly to no one, a new paper in Nature found that autonomous vehicles (Level 4, which is highway autonomy) lead to significantly reduced accident and injury/death rates.
OpenAI’s CEO: AI could kill creative jobs that “shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
Not to put too fine a point on this, but this sounds a little out of touch. The statement makes no sense—Adobe PageMaker and PostScript replaced the job of a typesetter, but that surely doesn't mean the job of a typesetter before PageMaker wasn't valuable and needed.
What We Are Reading
♾️ A New Model For Continuous Transformation It’s something we’ve been talking about for years. To survive in these times of the business landscape continuously evolving, one must build transformation into your company’s operating rhythm. @Jane
🔄 Recycling Is Broken. Should I Even Bother? Recycling’s challenges are systemic. In theory, every item you recycle can keep resources in the ground, avoid greenhouse gases, and help keep the environment healthy. But in reality, especially for plastics, recycling is labor-intensive and expensive, so it mostly doesn’t get recycled. @Mafe
🍎 Apple Intelligence And AI Maximalism Apple’s AI strategy reveal suggests a path toward a near future where generative AI is commodified as a generic technology enabling features inside the products of hundreds or thousands of companies @Jeffrey
🧠 Apple Is Bringing A.I. To Your Personal Life, Like It Or Not This sparks interesting considerations about how integrating AI more seamlessly into the products and services we use every day could affect the experience of our human connections. Furthermore, making it worthwhile to revisit the analogy of the bicycle for the mind. @Julian
🍔 McDonald’s Fires Its AI Drive-thru Cashiers AI, You are Fired: McDonald’s is discontinuing its AI voice ordering system at drive-thrus due to widespread reports of errors. Despite this failed experiment, AI continues to supercharge the food industry as anticipated. @Pedro
♻️ How The Recycling Symbol Lost Its Meaning Talking about recycling: The iconic recycling symbol has become a subject of debate in recent times. Here’s a closer look at the story behind it. @Pascal
(Random) Bits & Pixels
Study finds that sedentary coffee drinkers have a 24% reduced risk of mortality compared to sedentary non-coffee drinkers.
Lesson learned: Avoid selling pizza to Italians, it will bankrupt you.