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Welcome to Somethings, your weekly dose of highlights, recommendations and notes from my notebook. If you would like to receive this in your inbox, subscribe now. If you want to support, do checkout the links in the Friends of Somethings Section.
Things are not looking up for us. As mentioned in the previous newsletter, the supply shock is here. We are looking at high fuel prices for the foreseeable future. I would like to open with something more upbeat. However, it would be irresponsible to not acknowledge our grim reality.
Hopefully today’s selection should provide you with some distraction and/or insight.
🛠️ Somethings to Use
LinkedIn-Speak Translator
Usually I share useful tools in this section. Today I am sharing something fun; A LinkedIn speech translator. A translator that turns your mundane writings in to jumble of overly excited business speak. For example, “I love shrimp fried rice” translates to:
Thrilled to share my passion for shrimp fried rice! 🍤🔥 It’s all about the perfect synergy of ingredients and execution. Grateful for the culinary journey and the small wins that fuel our daily hustle. #Foodie #Innovation #Grateful #Synergy
A really fun tool. Try it with your favorite song lyrics.
📕Somethings to read
Job Killing Paradigm Shifts
The lesson is worth stating plainly. The ATM tried to do the teller’s job better, faster, cheaper; it tried to fit capital into a labor-shaped hole; but the iPhone made the teller’s job irrelevant. One automated tasks within an existing paradigm, and the other created a new paradigm in which those tasks simply didn’t need to exist at all. And it is paradigm replacement, not task automation, that actually displaces workers—and, conversely, unlocks the latent productivity within any technology. That’s because as long as the old paradigm persists, there will be labor-shaped holes in which capital substitution will encounter constant frictions and bottlenecks.
— David Oks, Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did
There is a lot of anxiety around mass job loss due to AI. Naysayers handwave the concerns by pointing out the example of the ATM as not killing the Bank Teller. However another technology did in fact destroy bank teller employment. The smartphone. Whether AI triggers a similar paradigm shift remains to be seen. But the concerns are not unwarranted.
New Luddism
But I’m struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money – but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.
There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They’re all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they’ll all be left behind because they didn’t learn your technology in utero?
—Terrence Eden, I’m OK being left behind, thanks!
The early adopters of every technology seem to turn in to evangelists for it. Same goes for AI. It may seem ‘inevitable’, but the same people also told us we will all be using Clubhouse daily.
It is ok to let things settle before jumping in.
📺 Somethings to watch
The “Epstein Files” are a masterclass in propaganda
The video discusses two aspects of Authoritarian propaganda.
- Flooding the Zone
- Poisoning the well
I am much more interested in the latter. How do you hide mundane crimes? By telling everyone that even more lurid, often ludicrous, crimes are taking place. You see it in your social media feeds in the wake of the Epstein dump from the US Department of Justice.
Rather than focus on the real crimes of child trafficking, you see claims of eating babies and a renewal of the “pizza gate” cannard. Do not fall for them.
Puzzling Developments
I like playing word games every morning. So I have decided recording them and posting them to YouTube as shorts.
They are less than a minute.
Subscribe here to get daily updates: https://youtube.com/@muddi900
Thank you for joining me this week. If you know some who might enjoy this, please forward this email to them. See you next week.
Mudassir Chapra