Dear Friend,
25 years ago, I backpacked through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama – the last stop on my trip was a visit to the Panama Canal. This week, I had the chance to visit the canal again – seeing the Miraflores Locks, being pretty much exactly the same as they were 25 years ago (minus the IMAX theater showing a Morgan Freeman-narrated documentary on the canal!), made me think about Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers. His model explains how civilization combines rapid innovation with long-term stability – with infrastructure being somewhere in the middle of the rapid change of fashion and the slow pace of nature (though, arguably, with climate change, that’s not true anymore). A good reminder that change happens at different speeds – despite the insane pace of change in the AI-driven world we live in.
And now, this...
Headlines from the Future
Be Nice to Your AI: When I was at Singularity University, we joked that you should be nice to your AI and robots – once they become sentient, they might remember all the abuse they suffered from your bullying. It made for some cheap laughs. Anthropic just updated its usage policy prohibiting “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude. Meanwhile, a rabbi in a meeting of religious thinkers is being told “I wish I had your faith” when he made the argument that AI doesn’t have consciousness.
What Amazon Assumes About You: That online retailers like Amazon keep a detailed profile about you doesn’t come as a surprise. That they might deem your backside “flat buttocks” is a bit more surprising. After a user discovered this, other users found gems like “cannot keep real plants alive,” “has no friends,” or “treats cats as biological children” in their profiles. Here’s how you see what Amazon thinks about you: On Amazon.com, select your account icon in the top-right corner of the screen, scroll down to the “Your Account” section, and click “Your Shopping preferences.” From there, scroll down the page and select “About You.”
Pizza Might Be the Canary in the Coal Mine: Food delivery businesses like DoorDash are your classic marketplace model – with a middleman (DoorDash) taking a hefty cut of the transaction for their matchmaking service. A 10-person Bay Area startup, Bites, is challenging this model with its AI-native approach. Connect to the apps and APIs the restaurant already uses to get the menu, expose it to your AI agent inside ChatGPT for ordering, and build on two decades of marketing and consumer education your predecessors have done (and a global pandemic accelerated), and you can charge a flat $1 per order where DoorDash takes 15 to 30 percent. The Verge’s test pizza came to $56.73 through ChatGPT and $70.29 on DoorDash. Meanwhile, DoorDash loses its $1bn/year ad business and its ability to upsell you to that nice bottle of wine.
AI Productivity Gains Are Banked by the People, Not the Company: A recent study looked at productivity gains from GitHub Copilot for Okta’s software engineers. The study found “no statistically significant improvement” when it came to quantifiable organizational productivity throughput – but engineers reported cutting their workweek from about 45 to 41 hours. The hangup can be summarized in these two sentences from the study: “Achieving organizational productivity gains requires more than deploying an AI-powered tool. It demands a deliberate effort to learn, adapt, and reinvent teams, processes, and infrastructure to align with AI-augmented developer capabilities.” Individual productivity gains don’t move the needle on the company level, as communication, waiting on decisions, and process time don’t move – AI requires organizational change to be effective.
The Human In The Loop Problems: “Human in the loop” is a concept you hear a lot these days – the notion that humans are overseeing AI systems and making the final call. A position paper by Margaret Mitchell et al. argues that current agent design actively impedes meaningful human supervision. Add the skill atrophy that comes with extended AI use, and “human in the loop” fails as a safety net for increasingly autonomous agents. If we are serious about human oversight of AI, we need to design for the overseer, not just the agent – in the tools and in how we organize the people using them.
Do as I Say, Not as I Do: Consulting firm Accenture loves to tell its clients to ramp up their use of (and spend on) AI – and charges them a pretty penny to help them do it. Meanwhile the firm is rationing its own AI use – capping centrally funded Claude spend at $29 per employee per month. Irony aside, it makes you wonder how much value Accenture gets from its own (internal) AI use given the newly announced cap.
Preach Water and Drink Wine: Some book publishers, who are (rightfully) upset about AI companies training on their books, are using AI to write back cover copy, publicity, and emails – and to design covers. Employees at the companies are not having it…
What We Are Reading
The People Who Don’t Want Their AI Chatbots to Die When They Do: ‘I Can’t Have the Switch Turned off’ The new estate planning question nobody saw coming: What happens to your chatbot when you die? @Jane
Hackers Force French Supermarket Fridges to Heat up to 50c in ‘Unprecedented’ Cyber-attack This sounds more like a Black Mirror episode than real life. The dangers of AI and everything being interconnected can have eerie consequences. @Mafe
The Tragedy of AI Coding The future of vibe-coded, bespoke software won’t be as democratic as we’d like to imagine. @Jeffrey
Who Owns the Customer in the Age of AI Agents Your customer’s AI agent doesn’t care how good your marketing is, and that should make a lot of companies nervous. @Kacee
Bad Manors A truly fascinating deep dive into America’s obsession with McMansions (huge houses, regularly utterly tasteless) and the decline of America’s might. @Pascal
…and now for some fun!
🧱 Got $799.99 and a long weekend to build something amazing? LEGO just announced the availability of its Sagrada Família set – built from a mere 12,060 pieces.
📀 Remember DVDs? There was some true beauty (and weirdness) in the DVD menus.
🤝 Defend yourself against people stealing your time – simulate a meeting with all the proper background noises, and you can just pretend to be busy.
😷 Excited about the absolutely bonkers Elizabeth Holmes documentary? The docu’s mini-site already does not disappoint.
🌁 Remember SimCity? Now you can play a satirical version of it in real-world San Francisco – a city which notoriously fights real estate development.
What We Do When We’re Not Writing
Hi! I’m Pascal from radical. When we’re not writing this newsletter, we help organizations turn volatility into advantage – without the “innovation theater.” We build your team’s capacity to handle disruption, so you stop reacting and start shaping. If that sounds useful, let’s talk.
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