The Commoditization of Social Interaction and Other Progress

The rise of social media has come with both many positive aspects and many negative aspects, societally-speaking. To name just a few on the positive side: being able to conveniently keep in touch with distant friends and family, having access to new, often valuable sources of information and entertainment, and having access to new places…

AI Research: the Corporate Narrative and the Economic Reality

In his widely-circulated essay, The Bitter Lesson, the computer scientist Rich Sutton argued in favor of AI methods that leverage massive amounts of data and compute power, as opposed to human understanding. If you haven’t read it before, I encourage you to do so (it’s short, well-written, and important, representing a linchpin in the corporate…