Ben Thompson: “The product overhang from the generative AI capabilities we have today are absolutely massive: there are so many new things to be built, and completely new application layer paradigms are at the top of the list. That, by extension, is the bridge that will unlock entirely new paradigms of computing. The road to the future needs to be built; it’s exciting to have the sense that the surveying is now complete.” Arnold Kling: “As I read Thompson’s post (and feel free to disagree with my interpretation), he is saying something close to what I have been saying. That is, the significance of Large Language Models is that they represent the latest development of the human-computer interface. They are a computing paradigm that allows us to communicate with a computer using natural language. Instead of having to use a mouse/pointer to communicate with a PC, or a finger-swipe to communicate with a smart phone, we can speak with the computer as if it were another human. In my view, we should not judge LLMs as encyclopedias or research assistants but as ways to talk to computers.”
WSJ: “Performance improvement plans (PIPs) are on the rise. Workers dread them. Managers do too…PIPs are intended to bring consistency and fairness to the way employees are judged and managed. Their stated goal is to lay out a path to improved performance—and sometimes it works. That said, many workers and even managers say they’re used primarily to provide legal cover from employment lawsuits or to cut costs without announcing layoffs.”
Mark Lila: “Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs. It is always possible to find proximate historical causes of these upsurges in the irrational — war, economic collapse, social change. But doing so can distract us from recognizing that the ultimate source lies deeper, in ourselves and in the world itself.”
Tavleen Singh: “There is almost no country in the world in which I have seen living conditions more abysmal than in India. They will improve only when ordinary citizens discover that they need basic, civic governance more than places of worship.”
WSJ: “Individuals’ own irrationalities provide incentives for savvy entrepreneurs to devise ways of profiting by correcting the ill consequences of these irrationalities. The result is the “ecological rationality” identified and celebrated by Vernon Smith – namely, the rationality of the market system.”
