Nobody Knows. Everyone Watches.
While most organizations deploy AI and learn nothing, a few are compounding advantage at speed. The rest are building biometric checkpoints, emotional monitoring headsets, and anonymity-destroying tex
Dear Friend,
Silicon Valley legend Kevin Kelly recently wrote an excellent piece on “our certain uncertainties.” It is one of those rare pieces where I highlighted nearly every sentence. I highly recommend adding it to your weekend reading list – to whet your appetite, let me just give you a stitched-together quote:
So for the next 10-15 years we have perpetual, continuous, severe uncertainty. This is a burdensome weight because people hate uncertainty more than bad news. […] What we end up with is a poly-X, a multi-factored unknown, an uncertainty cascade, a pervasive lack of confidence about the future, in an era of ambiguity. […] The most effective response to this multi-layered persistent uncertainty is not to seek impossible stability, but to cultivate radical adaptability and radical optionality.
Read it. I wish I were as eloquent as Kevin – the ideas and concepts he shared are very much what we have been preaching for years as well (and I am sure will sound and look familiar).
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
When Everyone Has AI and the Company Still Learns Nothing. We talked about a similar idea here on the Briefing before – we called it the “bifurcation of intelligence”: a world in which some companies deploy Copilot and call it a day, while others are rethinking their business models in an age of AI agents (and the rest of it). Robert Glaser digs deeper into this idea:
But the interesting AI work does not wait for the next community meeting. It appears inside a code review, a sales proposal, a research task, a product prototype, a production incident, a test strategy, a compliance question. Or when someone figures out that for a certain class of product components, they can set up something close to a dark factory: write the intent, let the agent run a very loose loop, apply enough backpressure to keep it on track, evaluate the outcome against strong scenarios, refine the intent, and repeatedly get high-quality results. By the time the story is cleaned up enough to become a best-practice slide, the important learning has often lost its teeth. What made it useful was the friction: the missing context, the test that failed, the weird API behavior, the moment where the agent sprawled into nonsense and someone had to pull it back.
And to stay in the theme of my new book OUTLEARN:
The next advantage is learning velocity. Who finds the real patterns faster? Who moves discoveries from individuals to teams to organizational capabilities? Who builds backpressure into agentic loops, so agents can’t sprawl? Who distributes useful agent capabilities without turning them into monolithic enterprise agents that fit nobody? Who finally uses agentic engineering to make agile real, instead of just slapping AI onto the old ceremonies?
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The Age-Gated Internet is Coming. In the (usually) well-meaning effort to keep minors from seeing stuff they shouldn’t, regulators around the world are pushing for age-gating the Internet. What started with sites which are obviously not for children, such as porn, is now being extended to social media and a bunch of other sites. There are a good number of reasons why this is a bad idea (and why it mostly doesn’t work anyway), but one of the more important ones is that it creates all kinds of privacy issues for all of us. Meta, not one to miss a beat, decided to take the bull by the horns:
Meta is unleashing AI that scans users’ bodies – from face shape to height – in an aggressive bid to root out underage accounts on Facebook and Instagram. The company announced Tuesday it was developing “advanced AI” that includes the use of visual analysis for detecting underage accounts. This new visual analysis technique will enable Meta’s AI to scan photos and videos for “visual clues” about a user’s age – including one’s height and bone structure.
Brave new world.
What We Are Reading
The Rise of Emotional Surveillance Burger King’s AI headset assistant is named Patty, and she’s judging whether you’re friendly enough. It is the scary future of work. @Jane
I’ve Covered Robots for Years. This One Is Different Instead of learning from videos of humans, these robots practice entirely in simulation, inventing their own solutions through trial and error, and they are scarily accurate. @Mafe
How to Remove the Wrong Kind of Friction (and Add the Right Kind) Plugging a very insightful, practical episode of a dear friend’s podcast here. Check out Lisa Kay Solomon’s conversation with Bob Sutton on friction as a design problem and its use and abuse in process, collaboration, and work. @Jeffrey
The Abundance Era We’ve spent the last decade overloading the skeleton (core systems) with things they were never meant to do. Advantage comes from treating the edge as tissue: something you can continuously rebuild, not protect. @Kacee
Appearing Productive in The Workplace An eloquent exploration of what happens when we remove “slowness” due to deliberate work from our outputs and instead focus on quantity as a measure of productivity. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
🤙 Action leads to reaction: “Telus uses ai to alter call-agent accents” – “AI ‘accent masking’ at overseas call centres sparks union backlash in Canada”
🚔 Turns out, self-driving cars commit traffic violations after all. And now, California gives them tickets.
👨💻 AI has the potential to make everyone a little smarter – but for the top 2% of workers, it might be a very different story: Ex-Meta manager says just 2% of engineers are winning the AI era.
🦹 If you are one of the people who have been writing in public (i.e., the Internet), you had better get used to the idea that your anonymity is gone: AI only needs 150 words to identify you. What does that mean for you?
🎬 How A.I. is transforming China’s entertainment industry.
🕴️ If in doubt, evoke Jevon’s Paradox and the world will be saved: Dario Amodei spent last year warning of an AI white-collar bloodbath. Now he’s changing the narrative.
📞 Nostalgic for your rotary phone of yesteryear? You can get it back! Here is the Rotary Un-Smartphone.
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Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. This newsletter is our labor of love. When we’re not writing, we run radical, a firm that helps organizations navigate the future without the “innovation theater.” Most leaders want to seize new opportunities, but they hate endless strategy decks that go nowhere. At radical, we don’t run “projects”; we build your organization’s internal capacity to handle disruption and change. Our goal is to make you future-proof so you can stop reacting to the world and start shaping it. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if we’re a good fit. Click here to speak with us.