Hello friends! If you would like to read some engrossing longform about Israel/Palestine this weekend (maybe with a good coffee or tea?)

I strongly recommend my newly-published article on the causes of the Oct 7 crisis in @newlinesmag:

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/how-changes-in-the-israeli-military-led-to-the-failure-of-october-7/

over the past few days I have found my little corner of the bird app completely taken over by people who think an evil superintelligent AI is going to take over the world and destroy humanity

I do not know where all these people came from

it is fundamentally different from the fear of computers taking our jobs

and it is coming from inside the tech community

and challenging that narrative results in incredibly vitriolic responses

my most curmudgeonly current opinion is that

people who think a machine learning algorithm trained on internet language is on the verge of doing hard intellectual work

have no idea what hard intellectual work is actually like

the slow, painful, migraine-inducing, comprehensively-researched, logically-contiguous labour of love that goes into every great work of art, science, and literature

the deep skill that takes years to hone like a fine blade

Because quality work isn’t just about sourcing information or assembling words. It’s about having something you desperately want to say and struggle to first understand, then communicate, and fight over and over and over again to clarify enough to get onto a page.

And if you’ve never experienced that beautiful, infuriating agony, it’s easy to think a machine can just generate ideas and solve hard problems.

Because you don’t see the work that goes in, and think it’s a simple matter or serendipity, “intelligence”, or pattern-matching.

The following needs to be stated clearly:

People in tech are not afraid of AI.

They are afraid of an incumbent monopoly instantly rolling out a net-new innovation to every enterprise business before startups can even play around with it.

Which is a terrifying new dynamic!

An entire community who believed in their heart of hearts that “startups innovate, incumbents catch up” just saw that narrative undeniably violated on a world-changing technology.

And that panic is more a byproduct of worldview collapse than anything else.

I think in dependency trees a lot. Not just in terms of engineering or resource planning, but structured innovation, too.

“What does success look like and what would we need to know to get there” is as valid a question as any about personnel, capital, time, or infrastructure.

there’s a flavour of tech thinking that starts from the assumption that everything is already known. There is no place for science or discovery in this worldview; anything unknown can merely be derived from sets of arbitrary assumptions called “first principles”.

This thinking results in problems being redefined to fit available solutions, instead of being solved by deeply studying a problem and solving the unknowns until a proper solution becomes possible.

Which makes it a worldview devoid of real innovation.