Art credit @Madison Harney
Spark of the Week
The more I ponder the reality of the Ambiguity Age the more I see the need for optimism and leadership. Optimism to imagine the possibilities and leadership to make sure that those ideas benefit humans. We are living in an age of opportunity but it will require enormous courage and resilience to invent a future that doesn't suck.
These next few years are going to be exceptionally hard on many of us - as we uncover risks we never imagined and setbacks of epic proportions. I don’t think most of us realize how much the recent past does not represent the emerging future. We have a lot to learn.
The next few years will be unsettling.
I do not believe technology will save us. I believe we will save ourselves. To do that we need to be well rested and in good health to be open to the hard work and creativity required to invent the future. With that in mind, my strong advice is the same as your mothers. Eat better food. Prioritize rest and movement. Read more fiction. Invest time and energy helping others and building real relationships. Be a good citizen and a great human. Do more things that bring you joy.
I do not know precisely what the future will bring, but I do know this, you will need every ounce of your personal wellbeing and your community of friends to thrive, so invest in your future now.
Together we are going to find a path forward. I believe in us.
Reading and Pondering
AI as a path to American Exceptionalism Nvidia alone is worth an amount equal to 14% of the total U.S. GDP
Book Reshuffle - Sangeet Paul Choudary . Filled with both context and insight. I highly recommend it.
Your best mode of (sustainable) growth might be upsells, not new customer acquisition
Cloud Market Share - Google’s new ARR bookings in the last quarter is the size of the whole industry’s bookings just three years ago.
History of payment cards 1914 to today - missing the fact that women couldn’t get their own credit cards until 1974
Eldercare - More workers are balancing eldercare than preschool and the future accelerates this trend. No matter how you look at this eldercare is a growth industry and one that I hope includes some innovation because it looks very unsustainable to me right now, and that was before the recent cuts to Medicaid.
Work and Jobs
Faster/Better/More - “the expectation that everything should move faster and output should go up”
The future of workforce strategy: less headcount planning, more workflow intelligence
Digital Everything – need to be careful of survivorship bias of course.
RTO and age (Nick Bloom insight)
Bleak outlook for New College Grad Jobs [data]
Garbage can theory and the pondering of how AI + Work will change. ( Ethan Mollick )
The cost of removing middle managers
Enshittification and P(catastrophe)
Old Boys clubs and pedigrees matter even more (sigh).
Bot-holes - Annoying, insensitive and rude bots - h/t Bob Sutton
Amy’s ponding (reference AI Companions for Teens)
AI Adoption and the competence penalty (of course it’s worse for Women)
AI at the expense of thinking - “Unthinking is damaging our thinking” - what should we make hard and what should we delegate and why.
AI’s “ethnic” slur - clanker
Who needs Habeas Corpus anyway?
Fun and Funny
Parents doing job searches for their kids (!)
When your energy drink actually a vodka cocktail
Lifehacks - AI and Others
AI apps templates for Claude (Han-Shen (Han) Yuan )
Comet ideas
Looping Back to You
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** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.
