Approaching AI in Your Career

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Other than mastering AI, I suggest leaning into the parts of your job that involve your physical presence and human relationships and away from the parts that involve analysis of large datasets or bodies of text. While you’re using these news tools — figuring out what machines can do and what you can do that they can’t — you should stop to enjoy the new functions, rather than simply assessing the threat.  -Megan McArdle writing in the Washington Post

Stealing from Yourself

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There once was a thief, a man named Emanuel Ninger. The year is 1887. The scene is a small neighborhood grocery store. Mr. Ninger is buying some turnip greens. He gives the clerk a $20 bill. As the clerk begins to put the money in the cash drawer to give Nr. Ninger his change, she notices some of the ink from the $20 bill is coming off on her fingers which are damp from the turnip greens. She looks at Mr. Ninger, a man she has known for years. She looks at the smudged bill. This man is a trusted friend; she has known him all her life; he can't be a counterfeiter. She gives Mr. Ninger his change, and he leaves the store.     

But $20 is a lot of money in 1887, and eventually the clerk calls the police. They verify the bill as counterfeit and get a search warrant to look through Mr. Ninger's home. In the attic they find where he is reproducing money. He is a master artist and is painting $20 bills with brushes and paint! But also in the attic they find three portraits Ninger had painted. They seized these and eventually sold them at auction for $16,000 (in 1887 currency, remember) or a little more than $5,000 per painting. The irony is that it took Ninger almost as long to paint a $20 bill as it did for him to paint a $5,000 portrait! It's true that Emmanuel Ninger was a thief, but the person from whom he stole the most was himself. He was another in the endless list of thieves who steal from themselves when they try to steal from others. 

Zig Ziglar

14 Recent Articles about AI & Robotics

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A Journalist’s AI 'Go Bag'

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"What should be in a journalist’s AI go bag? For starters, the one basic thing that should be in everyone’s bag, the AI prepper’s equivalent of a flashlight and bottled water: skill at using AI tools. It is not enough to use it as a slightly better Google; you need to keep abreast of the latest releases and spend time every week pushing both its capabilities and your own. Trying to make it do your job is table stakes. Try making it write a children’s book, or invent a new game, or solve cold fusion. As with any learning process, the outcome is less important than the effort, because the effort is how you learn not just what it can do, but what you could do with it." -Megan McArdle writing in The Washington Post

The advantages of flexibility

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Flexibility is valuable in almost any aspect of life – in school, on the job, in intimate relations with other people, and even in dealing with oneself. Just think of how much more effective teachers could be if they accommodated themselves to the varied styles of thinking in their classrooms, or how easy it would be to work for people who allowed us to be ourselves and to get our work done in ways that are effective for us, or how enjoyable it would be to be in a relationship with someone who fully appreciated us for ourselves – for our own likes and dislikes – rather than for what they would like us to be. The advantages of flexibility are so overwhelming that one wonders why we don’t emphasize it much more than we do in our teaching of our children, our students, and our employees. 

Robert Sternberg, Thinking Styles

22 Articles about What AI can do now

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NBC will use Jim Fagan’s AI-generated voice for NBA coverage –The Verge 

Eldercare robot helps people sit and stand, and catches them if they fall – MIT

4 ways I use AI as an accessibility specialist – Scott Vinkle Blog 

AI Helped Heal My Chronic Pain – Wall Street Journal 

AI headphones translate multiple speakers at once, cloning their voices in 3D sound – Univ of Washington  

New Lego-building AI creates models that actually stand up in real life - Ars Technica  

An AI-created video of a murdered man is used to deliver a victim's statement at a killer's sentencing – BBC

World biometric identity network launches in U.S. with iris-scanning stores - The Washington

Visa and Mastercard unveil AI-powered shopping – Tech Crunch 

The Evolution of AI Products – LukeW

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users – 404 Media   

I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months. AI Has Replaced My Memory. – Wall Street Journal

An AI-generated radio host in Australia went unnoticed for months – The Verge

These autistic people struggled to make sense of others. Then they found AI. – Washington Post

Mother feeling lonely? Pay for an AI app to give her a call – The Times

Google created a new AI model for talking to dolphins - Ars Technica  

Wearable AI system helps blind people navigate – Techxplore  

An AI model that learns to predict how quantum systems evolve – The Quantum Insider  

Google AI masters Minecraft - Semafor 

Philly’s new Vision Zero dashboard shows where and how crashes happen – Technical.ly

Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots – New York Times

Walgreens doubles down on prescription-filling robots to cut costs, free up pharmacists amid turnaround – CNBC

Bot Trained to Provide Students Feedback on Assignments

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A communication professor at the University of Washington, developed a custom A.I. chatbot by training it on versions of old assignments that she had graded. It can now give students feedback on their writing that mimics her own at any time, day or night. It has been beneficial for students who are otherwise hesitant to ask for help, she said.  “Is there going to be a point in the foreseeable future that much of what graduate student teaching assistants do can be done by A.I.?” she said. “Yeah, absolutely.” - New York Times

The Importance of Leisure

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German philosopher Josef Pieper wrote, “We mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity." 

In a world of “total work,” there is no space for contemplation or rest. There is no need for people to be in “harmony with themselves” as long as they are employed. To “know thyself” is a secondary concern, and any sort of break from work is merely in the service of doing more work. 

As Pieper put it:

The simple ”break” from work — the kind that lasts an hour, or the kind that lasts a week or longer — is part and parcel of daily working life. It is something that has been built into the whole working process, a part of the schedule. The ”break” is there for the sake of work. It is supposed to provide ”new strength” for ”new work,” as the word ”refreshment” indicates: one is refreshed for work through being refreshed from work. 

Paul Millerd writing in Quartz

22 Articles about the Business of Running an AI Company

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AI Startup Perplexity’s Valuation Surges to $14 Billion in New Funding Round – Wall Street Journal  

Google AI Overviews leads to dramatic reduction in clickthroughs for Mail Online – Press Gazette

How China’s Biggest Chipmaker, SMIC, Could Threaten U.S. AI Dominance - Wall Street Journal

AI Is Not Your Friend How the “opinionated” chatbots destroyed AI’s potential, and how we can fix it – The Atlantic

Reports: US losing edge in AI talent pool - Semafor

Google Plans to Roll Out Its A.I. Chatbot to Children Under 13 – New York Times

Researchers Find Easy Way to Jailbreak Every Major AI, From ChatGPT to Claude -Futurism 

Advanced AI gets more unpredictable - Axios 

Here’s How Big the AI Revolution Really Is, in Four Charts - Wall Street Journal

Sam Altman Admits That Saying "Please" and "Thank You" to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power -Futurism

Immigrant founders are the norm in key U.S. AI firms: study - Axios

Reasoning models don't always say what they think - Anthropic

Nvidia reveals plans to manufacture some AI chips in the U.S. – NBC News 

Oracle to provide cloud computing, AI services to Singapore military – Reuters  

Nvidia to Make AI Supercomputers Entirely in U.S. - Wall Street Journal

AI startup is reportedly aiming for a massive $2B seed round – Tech Crunch

Google unveils Ironwood, its most powerful AI processor yet – ArsTechnica

Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks to make it appear its new AI model is better than the competition  - The Verge  

Google is in trouble... but this could change everything - and no, it's not AI - ZDnet 

OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting over college students with free AI – The Verge 

Why the AI Revolution Will Require Massive Energy Resources - AEI

Perplexity partners with PayPal for in-chat shopping as AI race heats up – CNBC

Impersonating People with Down Syndrome

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AI-generated accounts impersonating people with Down syndrome are spreading across social media. Many of these artificial intelligence-backed profiles are gaining followers faster than real disability advocates — and they're making money from it. For people with Down syndrome, these fake accounts can feel like a new level of discrimination — one where their lived experiences are copied, exaggerated and monetized. -CBS News

The Time Test

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If a class of students are allowed an hour to complete an essay test and one student completes her assignment before the time is up, she isn’t penalized, is she? The assignment was to write an essay, not merely to use the time. 

But what if using the time was the assignment? If a person is told to use an entire day profitably, but he becomes bored and diverted by mid-morning, wasting the balance of the day, then his speed is worthless.

The same is true when life is the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with us is to have failed to complete the assignment. 

The Backfire Effect 

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The backfire effect happens when the myth ends up becoming more memorable than the fact. One of the most striking examples of this was seen in a study evaluating a “Myths and Facts” flyer about flu vaccines. Immediately after reading the flyer, participants accurately remembered the facts as facts and the myths as myths. But just 30 minutes later this had been completely turned on its head, with the myths being much more likely to be remembered as “facts”.  The thinking is that merely mentioning the myths actually helps to reinforce them. And then as time passes you forget the context in which you heard the myth – in this case during a debunking – and are left with just the memory of the myth itself. 

Mark Lorch writing in Business Insider  

err in the direction of kindness

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Below is part of a commencement speech given by George Saunder on May 11, 2013.

Accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. 

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so Wonderful.

The superstar's weakest spot 

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What's the simplest way to diminish the skills of a superstar talent (short of inflicting an injury)? What would be the surest method of ensuring that LeBron James started clinking jump shots, or that Yo-Yo Ma started fudging chords? The answer: don't let them practice for a month. Causing skill to evaporate doesn’t require chromosomal rejiggering or black-ops psychological maneuvers.

It only requires that you stop a skilled person from systematically firing his or her circuit for a mere 30 days. Their muscles won't have changed; their much vaunted genes and character will remain unaltered; but you will have touched their talent at the weakest spot in its armor.

Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code