Email Template

The Information has a simple mission: deliver important, deeply reported stories about the technology business you won’t find elsewhere.

‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Join high-powered tech and business leaders who read The Information every day. Save 25% on an annual subscription.

The Information Forum Digest

May 17, 2023

The top posts from The Information’s subscriber only community.

WRITE POST NOW

FEATURED POSTS

The top posts from The Information’s subscriber only community. Add a post.

What LLMs teach us about ‘fairness’ in human societies and the value of social correlation vs. causation

Posted by Sam Lessin · Intern

7 hours ago

Start from these two points:

(a) the way LLMs work isn’t any real intelligence. They just take a ton of existing content, and play an...

TOP COMMENTS

The top comments from The Information’s subscriber only community.

Benjamin Parr
on

Message »

Duane Paulson Past results don't always predict future performance. The automation of the past took decades to spread -- enough time for new jobs to be created. This revolution is happening MUCH faster. The people IBM will eliminate in the next 5 years -- what will they do? Especially if a bunch of other companies follow IBM's lead?

The time frame is compressed, which changes the equation.

Sofia Fenichell
on AI Will Destroy Jobs. So What Are We Going to Do About It?

Message »

I used to run a boutique publishing company. It took 20 artists, writers and designers to create 50,000 pieces of multi-modal curriculum-aligned content in a year. I now run a generative AI personalised learning company and it takes 8 engineers and 3 AI curriculum designers to create 1 million pieces of curriculum-aligned content in six months. And the tech IP investment scales. The content is deeply personalized. The job loss implications and need for retraining are substantial.

Hilary Lee
on AI Will Destroy Jobs. So What Are We Going to Do About It?

Message »

The fact that the author of this opinion piece is a "journalist turned AI founder," suggests that he may have a conflict of interest in his predictions. Suggesting that AI is powerful enough to replace hundreds of millions of jobs (and of course companies must purchase access to AI models to remain competitive) is of course extremely effective marketing for a person running an AI company.

Brian Shilhavy
on AI Will Destroy Jobs. So What Are We Going to Do About It?

Message »

The technology sector has been consolidating since last year with hundreds of thousands of layoffs already, even before the AI hype, and not because technology was replacing their jobs, but because there was too much fluff and people getting overpaid for the "work" they were doing. This shift is the result of the exit of easy money and low interest rates, and that will probably continue.

So this is part of a much larger shift, and the hype over AI is still mostly overstated, as AI still cannot safely drive a vehicle with total automation, for example. Curating knowledge very rapidly is one thing, but how much of the economy does that comprise of?

People have become too narrow minded in their view of technology today, completely ignoring other areas of the economy where technology has obviously been failing.

Take agriculture, for example. Big Tech believes that one day technology will produce all our food on "1-person" farms where technology does all the rest. That's foolish thinking, because technology has already replaced many farm workers for decades now, at the cost of producing highly contaminated and unhealthy food.

The recent floods in California, where most of the nation's food is produced, showed just how fragile even the current vertically integrated mega farms are when a natural disaster comes. Food security for our nation does not depend on MORE technology, but less, with MORE labor and people being trained in small-scale sustainable agriculture producing healthy food the way it has been produced for thousands of years, without chemical inputs and expensive farm equipment.

And I have been saying that for over 20 years now, providing access to such food, as I have watched this country go in the opposite direction leaving us very vulnerable due to our faith in the technology.

Very few discuss all the energy that is needed to produce and run this technology, and just in that one area alone this rapid growth in AI is not sustainable.

The "Great Reset" that the World Economic Forum has been predicting is coming, one way or another, and the economy is going to change as we suffer through some "corrections" to people's way of thinking about the technology.

More banks are failing, as are many technology companies, and it is not due to AI replacing humans.

Will we soon only have a few banks to choose from because all the others failed, and the largest ones are "too big to fail"? And as the economy crashes and goes through its corrections, will only the largest technology companies survive because they too are "too big to fail"? Especially since the military and intelligence agencies all have their data stored with them?

The greatest threat to LLM AI is not in replacing jobs, but "who controls the data?"

Alexander Calfee
on AI Will Destroy Jobs. So What Are We Going to Do About It?

Message »

I cofounded a company with a technology that eliminates about 50-60% of a sourcing recruiter’s daily activity. Considering that entry level recruiting is an on-ramp into the corporate world this sort of thing will definitely impact the hiring in this field.

I have no opinion on UBI except for the fact that work is much more than a paycheck. A great reordering will come, and perhaps a massive debt jubilee to go along with it.

Corporate Subscriber Circle

Vauban from Carta: SPVs & funds for VC and angel investors

TapOnIt: The next generation of SMS

Thoughtworks: Extraordinary impact through technology excellence

Loxz: Discover the Winning Edge: Loxz ML Team

Felicis: Luck isn't made; it's engineered.

Learn More

Sent to hello@SmilesDavis.yeah | Unsubscribe | Help

Save this email to start commenting

Save this email to start commenting