Quiet Storm: Big Signals in a Slower Week
Fewer headlines, bigger takeaways: AI, creativity, systems thinking, and more.
Dear Friend,
After last week’s monster edition, the Internet seems to have taken a breather and slowed down a tiny bit (at least in our corner of the world – still plenty of world news, of course).
Time to sit back, relax, and enjoy your latest edition of signal spotting…
What We Are Reading
❤️ Doctors Develop AI Stethoscope That Can Detect Major Heart Conditions in 15 Seconds After two centuries unchanged, the humble stethoscope has just received a massive AI upgrade that can spot life-threatening heart conditions in the time it takes to tie your shoes. @Jane
💡 Why Your Organization Should Focus Less on Productivity and More on Creativity Why Your Organization Should Focus Less on Productivity and More on Creativity @Mafe
🔄 Why You Need Systems Thinking Now Despite peaking in popularity in the 1990s as an approach to creative problem-solving in business, systems thinking is uniquely well-suited to today's complex and interconnected environments. @Jeffrey
⚠️ Beware the AI Experimentation Trap Most AI bets fail because they're experiments in search of a problem. The edge goes to leaders who ground AI in real customer value and design it to scale. @Kacee
🤖 A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem. First, mobile phones took boredom away from us (nobody is ever bored, ever again) – with negative effects on creativity. Now, AI robs us of loneliness – with similarly unsettling effects. @Pascal
Rabbit Hole Recommendations
Talk about “dual purpose”: “Your food-delivery rider can cut heart attack response times in half”
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the use of AI in healthcare settings might deskill your doctor (this is inline with what we have seen in other professions – AI tends to make you lazy and thus “dumb”): “Dependence on AI may deskill doctors: Lancet”
Curious as to what AI bots are actually doing, how aggressively they gobble up everything they can, and how little they care about the Open Web? Here is Cloudflare’s AI Insights.
Leave it to Simon Willison (our nerdy go-to man when it comes to AI) to conjure up the image of AI being a “lossy encyclopedia”. Spot on!
We talked about this here before – AI is getting cheaper, and more expensive at the same time. While inference/token prices are coming down, reasoning models burn through massive amounts of tokens to give you an answer: “Cutting-edge AI was supposed to get cheaper. It’s more expensive than ever”.
Your next (large-scale) battery might very well be made out of sand: “Finnish city inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh sand battery”
Let the onslaught continue… It does make you wonder how people feel (and thus how much long-term loyalty you will get), when you keep telling your people they are worthless… “Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 layoffs ‘because I need less heads’ with AI”
Happy Distractions
🇷🇴 Why Romania excels in international Olympiads
📖 The history of the book chapter: “Just a little longer.”