“Humans can be held to account. Not AI.” I hear this often. But it’s not true. Corporations are non-human, but they can enter into contracts and face criminal charges. Ships can be sued directly. Courts can arrest the vessel itself. Deities and temples in India can own property. Forests and rivers in New Zealand, Colombia, Spain, have been granted legal personhood. Medieval Europe has held animal trials (e.g. for “guilty” pigs). ...
In a recent talk at IIT Madras, I highlighted how large language models (LLMs) are taking over every subject of the MBA curriculum: from finance to marketing to operations to HR, and even strategy. One field that seemed hard to crack was innovation. Innovation also happens to be my role. But LLMs are encroaching into that too. LLMs are great connection machines: fusing two ideas into a new, useful, surprising idea. That’s core to innovation. If we can get LLMs daydreaming, they could be innovative too. ...
This week, I learned: Hidden brain podcast. Innovation 2.0 solve your own problem. Don’t solve other people’s problems. This helps you pick what you’re good at affordable losses. Make sure you survive borrow others’ spares. spare time, scrap data, anything others don’t use. If you can monetize it, you can pay them back focus on the controllable. Ignore what’s outside your control don’t even waste time on it curl supports globbing, emails Beetrove is a ranking of the popularit of OpenAI GPTs Gemini Prompt Guide has detailed examples of how each role can use Gemini ESLint’s new flat configuration does not support package.json
Paul Graham pens another brilliant essay on Is it worth being wise? It’s mostly about the difference between being wise (right most of the time) versus being smart (being right where few others are). If you’re picking between options, being wise is useful. There is a best option, and you’ll pick it most of the time. If you’re doing something creative, there’s no finite set of options. Then it’s worth being smart. Increasingly, tasks are asking for more creativity, so it may be better to be smart.
It’s worth starting a startup based on an idea even if it is easy to copy. First of all, it will take competitors a long time to realize that your idea is even a good thing to do. Even when competitors realize your idea is good, (a) it will take them a long time to implement and (b) they’ll probably screw up critical things. And finally, working on your ideas will lead you on to new ideas. So you’ll be a moving target; by the time competitors copy what you’re doing now, you’ll be doing more. ...
25 technologies for 2003. via Anders
The Economist on how copyrights aren’t really helping creativity, which is what they were intended to do in the first place. via andersja
Tech Review. Interesting magazine with recent tech trends. Comments
An important innovation by Guinness (the beer, not the book of records)
Time: Inventions of the year.