AI, yai, yai
Everyone and their agentic dog has had something to say about Anthropic's AI study. However, Carlo Iacono’s analysis pulled at threads I’d never before connected.
By his reckoning, the institutions that AI is being dropped into - education, workplaces, healthcare, housing markets - were already broken. And AI has merely moved into a space that had previously been emptied.
“What looks like a technology crisis turns out to be a pre-existing condition that the technology made impossible to ignore [...] The 81K study reads less as a report about what people want from AI than as a diagnostic scan of a civilisation that outsourced its care infrastructure, overloaded its workers, defunded its public spaces, and then watched a machine move into every gap it left empty. The respondents are not confused about what they are asking for. They are asking for what was taken from them. That AI is the tool they are asking with, and the tool that threatens to take more, is the entanglement the study maps with clinical precision.”
Morality around the world
The fine folk over at Pew Research Center asked adults in 25 countries to rate whether 9 different behaviours are morally unacceptable, acceptable or not an issue, then cut the results by country, gender, age, religion and decade. Well worth a poke through.
“In 10 countries, a majority says gambling is morally wrong, including 89% in Indonesia and 71% in Italy. Meanwhile, in another 10 countries, a majority says gambling is morally acceptable or not a moral issue.”
Take fun seriously
Are you having fun at work? Eat Big Fish has written about the role of fun and laughter in creativity. They quoted Heather McGill, who said:
“If you can all be having fun in the design, you can pretty much guarantee that your guests at the end of the day are going to be on the receiving end of that joy and that fun. And I think it plays out at the end. If it's been hard, too hard in the creation, then it's probably not going to be the kind of joyful wonder that you were expecting at the other end.”
As someone whose favourite day at WMT HQ involved chariot racing our office chairs using hoverboards as the propellant, I endorse this message.
How to disagree agreeably
Carrying on with the workplace commandments, we need better ways of pushing back on things without making people feel like they’ve just handed you a tepid cup of tea. Otherwise we risk putting people off raising their hand altogether.
Admired Leadership has shared 3 less forceful ways of disagreeing, including:
“Ask the other party for more options or proposals. This clearly says that the leader disagrees but focuses the attention on what is next, not on the difference of opinion. “What other ideas do you have?” or “What other options exist?” rejects the current proposal but does so in a way that moves the conversation forward without the strong feeling of rejection.”
And finally…
I’m by no means a bird person. However, Nadieh Bremer’s and Visual Cinnamon’s exploration of how we search for birds makes me want to go full twitcher. The data visualisation and illustrations are truly marvellous.
Looking at the world horizontally scrambles my brain.
Unpacking how mechanical pencils work. Go forth and click yours smug in the knowledge of your lead-based enlightenment.
Bon weekend,
Fran