The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Positioned

Vatman: Strange New Worlds – Searching for the Exit Routes

 
What’s happening at Google is part of a broader, looser phenomenon than the Innovator’s Dilemma, one that applies at a bunch of different levels: at the corporate level, where it was born, up to the national level, and down to the individual level.

America is deeply Positioned, which makes it challenging to innovate and take risks the way it used to. That’s a subject for another post.

People can be deeply Positioned, too. The more time you’ve spent getting good at a particular thing, the more you identify with that thing, the more Positioned you are, the better you get at that thing but the harder it is to change when the circumstances do, too. Maybe that’s for another post, as well.

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Plus

–Vatman: Strange New Worlds

Vatman is often accused of lying, making things up, spinning a synthetic yarn and passing it off as pure silk. But the reality is worse: they can see, but they’re blind; they can hear, but they’re deaf. Vatman is a being without a world.

No one would care if it were not for their newly found powers, of their capacity to mimic insight and intelligence. In their LLM avatar, Vatman can pass our internal censors quite easily.

You know, what used to be called the Turing Test.

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-Searching for the Exit Routes

At the heart of this newsletter is an attempt to understand technological modernity and our relationship with it.

In this essay I attempt to draw together much of the thinking I’ve done across the last three years, and to summarise my overarching position.

Given that, this can be thought of as a totemic New World Same Humans instalment. I hope it proves valuable, and there will be more along these lines in the coming months.

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