Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
It can get lost amid the AI excitement that there are other shortages in this world besides brainpower. I can think of a few other scarce resources: time… money… empathy… compassion… food… water… rare earth minerals… reliable observational data…. Intelligence can help ease these other scarcities through efficiency gains, technological advancements, and social engineering. But … Continue reading…
“Aren’t we entering that era where we’re all just creating content for each other? So as long as we get paid, it’ll be fine…” -Betsey Stevenson (via What’s Your Problem?)
“[When you] wash your hands [in] some building, you don’t have to say, ‘Well, I hope this building has clean water that won’t give me cholera.’ … because there are standards for that.” But you do wonder if the building’s air will give you the flu or covid, because the analogous public health standards are … Continue reading "Healthy air standards"
I finally read The Mom Test, a lovely little book about how to do effective customer research for startups. It kept reminding me of the quote that confirmation bias is the single biggest problem in business. The Mom Test adds the related finding that social norms are full of white lies, which help keep the … Continue reading "The perils of people being nice to you"
The mistake that engineers sometimes make is that they assume by destroying [inefficient] institutions, you would necessarily be able to replace them with something better, which is not always the case — and it also ignores a lot of the wisdom that accretes slowly within the idiosyncratic practices and byways of an institution. Institutions sometimes … Continue reading "Government by engineer"
I’m surprised how often I hear well-informed people argue that modern AI models are still “just repeating things that are in the training data.” This is simply not true. Large language models routinely solve math problems they have never seen, write poems that have never been written, and program software algorithms that are not in … Continue reading "AI is capable of creativity"
Something I hear a lot in debates about AI are variations of: “sure, this chatbot can [do online research, tutor you in chemistry, search for drug candidates, …], but it’s not really intelligent.” A similar sentiment was common in the 1960s and ’70s when electronic computers were first becoming widespread. “Sure, it can solve thousands … Continue reading "Un-bundling intelligence"
One of my photographs was recently featured in the Seattle Times. Someone asked if they could purchase prints, so I went ahead and created a storefront where you can order art prints and other products displaying my landscape photographs. Robin Stewart Photography Studio I consider it to be just a hobby, but I keep an … Continue reading "Landscape photography prints"
“Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.” -Brené Brown (source)
Sometimes it’s not very helpful to optimize a model.