badfutures.com
Founder and Futurist @ refuturing, Bourbon Enthusiast, Recovering Political Theorist, Former Musician, Kentuckian recently returned from exile in Austin. Revolution is not for the sane.
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Yup. It's also why the Hobbit movies were such absolute shit. Peter Jackson became so impressed with himself he felt he could just re-write the Hobbit book wholesale.
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Angry Bond is underrated, really.
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And Ive's record on software/UI is...not great.
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It’s insane that this piece could be considered controversial in any way. And yet, here we are.
(Thanks for sharing this, btw)
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Like, Teenage Engineering did an incredible job with the Rabbit. Great design. The hardware was killed by shitty AI. I don’t think Ive is going to be able to make this work either.
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Goddamnit. I'm so sorry to hear this.
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If you want the 90s Knicks back you gotta have Reggie Miller heroics back too I don’t make the rules
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They really are. But then again, I guess if you're gonna drive off a cliff, you might as well accelerate.
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I wish I could Like this Skeet more than once. 🤠
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They always think they’re special, and therefore somehow immune. www.businessinsider.com/marc-andrees...
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If anyone could have made this happen on-device with a simple architecture it would have been Apple. They had some amazing patents, a great private off-device capability, and an OS architected to do this. But somehow, couldn’t make it work. That should give everyone pause here.
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It’s a fairy tale understanding of the architecture of these systems, really. But guys like Thompson don’t care. People imagine some virtual robot pressing buttons on their behalf w/ a human-like understanding, rather than a set of shaky automations daisy-chained together with a duct tape protocol.
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This is where I think the metaphors we use start to get us into trouble. All forms of automation start to blur into one.
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So, AI Agents in the sense you describe them and the concert ticket automation you describe operate very differently, with different stacks and dependencies. The SIS functionality doesn’t get altered, but the Agents pressing the buttons operate by a non-SIS set of rules.
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As someone for whom this is also an occupational hazard, I can recommend this piece by Scott Smith. It helps. medium.com/practical-fu...
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Or, given the jankyness of the protocols linking agents together, what if that starts happening unintentionally because somebody didn’t anticipate the side effects of some bad prompting and orchestration? Sort of the “be careful how you phrase a wish to a genie” situation.
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Or, at an institution that uses analytics to develop pathways behind the scenes that would be “better” for a student’s success. Or the Institution‘s. How can a student trust the Agent to act according to their will and not the Institution’s? I sure wouldn’t.
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Imagine the calls from angry students and parents a president who implements such a scheduling system will get when this thing messes up a large number of student schedules during critical times. Even if students don’t touch the SIS, the “Agent” will.
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Yeah, but even if it ends up adopted by a number of industries in a more or less permanent fashion, we shouldn’t assume that it will work as hoped or expected.
The tagline I’ve given folks of late is: “AI: Imagine everything you have now, only crappier. And less trustworthy.”
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You may still be wrong! But buckling from popular sentiment in echo chambers full of tech bros and AI Enthusiasts is no way to go about life.
The only way to do good work in this field is embracing the Willingness to Be Wrong (but Directionally Correct).
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Being willing to admit your errors and shift positions quickly (Strong Opinions Loosely Held) is a virtue in the foresight and technology game.
But when you’ve done the research, talked with experts, reviewed the literature and made the analysis and you are confident in your position, hold fast.
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I suspect it comes down to FOBW (Fear of Being Wrong). The volume of “smart” people making outrageous claims has gotten so loud and so pervasive that I see people who know better doubting themselves in the face of it.
And it worries me.
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Mushroom, mushroom. Amen.
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Yeah, I don't mean to say there aren't some staffing issues. But comms going down in the same way, under the same conditions, for the same periods of time reeks of software that was fucked by whatever the DOGE Kids did to try and score Starlink a contract to replace them. It's their M.O.
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