Matt Ridley: “An innovation that eventually disrupts the world is like the apocryphal butterfly wing flap in the Amazon that starts a hurricane in the Atlantic. This “butterfly effect”, coined by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1961, suggests that small events can trigger huge and unpredictable consequences. Good luck catching a real butterfly in the act of starting a hurricane. I read every essay on the future impact of artificial intelligence with this unpredictability in mind. Nobody, however clever, can yet foresee what the consequences of generative AI will be. My generally optimistic take could be as wrong as other people’s doom-mongering. It could be huge or a nothing burger. We just do not know and it’s no good hoping we will know: we will find out as it happens.”
WSJ: The 24 New Rules for Succeeding at Work. “How do you get a raise? How do you make work dinners palatable? How do you deal with an overwhelmed middle manager? We asked the people who would know.”
Steve Newman: 14 Reasons Robotics is Hard. “Demos draw attention to the things a robot can already do. The question then becomes: what’s missing? In today’s post, I’ll catalog the technical challenges that will have to be overcome along the road to broadly capable artificial workers. The next time you watch a robot doing something impressive, ask yourself: which of these capabilities has the robot demonstrated, and which challenges might the demo scenario be avoiding?”
NYTimes: “The screens of foldable phones are a triumph of materials science and microengineering. No single breakthrough or industrial secret makes them possible; rather, a series of complementary feats makes a display flexible enough to bend many thousands of times without snapping yet strong enough to survive drops and other abuse. Glass — the brittle, breakable kind — is what scientists call an “amorphous solid.” It looks and acts like a solid, but glass atoms are actually frozen in a liquid-like state. Everyday glass shatters when bent because those atoms lie in a rigid matrix that, when thick, leads to extreme tension on the outer edge of the curved surface.”
