I have three things for you this week, and they’re all top-shelf, if I may say so. I try to to waste anyone’s time with these weekly missives, and this week I don’t at all worry I am. These are all well, well, WELL worth your time.
FIRST: News Minimalist is an A.I.-curated set of daily headlines from all newspapers, designed to show you nothing below a certain (fairly high) threshold of “importance”. Now obviously importance is subjective, but I’ve been reading it daily for more than a month and in my view it does an excellent job of interpreting importance in the sense of “has a big/lasting effect”.
No matter what your politics are, so much of our news now is dominated by things that just don’t make much difference in the medium or long term, but rather by things that produce strong emotion. Literally anything about the 2024 Presidential election at this point, for example.
This site is an excellent, free antidote to that. It’s how I start my day almost every day, and you should consider doing the same. Think of it as an effective filter, that can intake an amount of news and stuff that would leave you soulless, and only allow through a genuinely representative sample of stuff that matters.
SECOND: This interview between Patrick Collison and Sam Altman. Two of the smartest, best informed guys on the planet talking about a variety of issues. I could listen to them talk for four hours and be riveted, and while I don’t expect others to share that level of enthusiasm, 52 minutes shouldn’t be too much for anybody.
Collison is one of the founders of Stripe Payments, a world-changing payments platform that is doing the (in my opinion) heroic work of basically automating bureaucracy throughout the world and offering compliance as a service.
Altman is the President of OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), and former CEO of Y Combinator, (arguably) the most important startup hub in the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
I have a tempermentally ambivalent relationship with the tech community as a cultural phenomenon (read: lots of the people in it I find personally annoying), but these two guys are thoughtful, and they are absolutely at the forefront of determining where our society goes, as much if not more than any politician. It pays to know.
THIRD: I have not yet read this book, but I will. A lay-of-the-land look at A.I.’s rapidly-expanding role in Medicine. What I know going in is: 1) There are already-very-old people who will be diagnosed with things by A.I., 2) There are people already born who in their adult lives will *only* be diagnosed with things by A.I. (though a human may deliver the news), and 3) The diagnostic and treatment potential of A.I. is dwarfed by its potential as a research tool.
Here’s the best argument for going full-speed ahead with A.I. development in spite of very real existential risks to human civilization: The upside is that it might cure all currently known diseases and save billions of lives over the next century, so it’s actually worth the (small but real) risk of destroying ourselves.
This sounds like hyperbole, but I’m convinced that it’s not, that the range of possible outcomes really is that large. In view of that, it’s strange this book isn’t an international bestseller and front page news, but you should probably shrug off the judgment of mass culture and consider reading it anyway. (or, tbh, wait until I read it and give you the highlights, I get that people are busy.)
That’s all for this missive. I hope you found something that piqued your interest. I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story, and until then have a great week!
News Minimalist seems like a very helpful one. I imagine it’ll help prevent people who keep up with the news from going insane from information overload.