Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic.
But we're running into physical and economic barriers that aren't worth crossing.
We're starting to see that putting everything online has real and troubling social costs.
And the devices we use are becoming 'good enough', to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.
So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
Unless we screw it up.
And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.
Veille - 2024
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décembre
La semaine de quatre jours a séduit l'Allemagne. 73% des entreprises ayant participé à une étude pilote refusent de revenir à la semaine de cinq jours. Productivité maintenue, bien-être accru : le modèle "100-80-100" fait ses preuves et ouvre la voie à une nouvelle organisation du travail.
In a recent earnings call Sundar Pichai claimed that at Google now 25% of Code is AI generated (“and then reviewed and accepted by engineers”). In the AI boosterism parts of the web (so basically X and LinkedIn) this number was celebrated: Even Google does AI code generation. So if your whole startup is just ChatGPT in a trenchcoat, you’re basically at the industry standard, right?
Let’s not be cynical here and point at Google’s not exactly stellar recent track record when it comes to great products and software, but let’s ask us where that number comes from and what it means.
There would be a 5% chance that a single chimp would successfully type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime. And the probability of one chimp constructing a random sentence - such as "I chimp, therefore I am" - comes in at one in 10 million billion billion, the research indicates.
Jezz Bezos and Elon Musk emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average human does in their entire life. That’s according to a new report from Oxfam International, a British NGO that fights poverty.
I went to the UX Brighton conference yesterday.
The quality of the presentations was really good this year, probably the best yet. Usually there are one or two stand-out speakers (like Tom Kerwin last year), but this year, the standard felt very high to me.
But…
The theme of the conference was UX and “AI”, and I’ve never been more disappointed by what wasn’t said at a conference.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self's weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you start your diet.
There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or pressure. I'm certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be conned – it makes you more of a mark, not less.
Saviez-vous que si on parle aujourd’hui français en Suisse romande, il n’en a pas toujours été ainsi ? Pendant des siècles, les Romands parlaient des langues cousines du français, elles aussi descendantes du latin. Comment le français a-t-il pris racine en Suisse romande et éclipsé les autres langues ? Pour comprendre de quelle façon cette transition s’est opérée, il est essentiel de plonger dans l’histoire riche et complexe de la région…
Mais l’élargissement des autoroutes permettrait-il réellement d’atteindre l’objectif souhaité, à savoir réduire les embouteillages? La recherche nous a appris que non. En tant que professeurs et chercheurs dans le domaine des transports et de la mobilité actifs dans les universités suisses, nous souhaitons expliquer pourquoi dans les paragraphes qui suivent.
As OpenAI and Meta introduce LLM-driven searchbots, I'd like to once again remind people that neither LLMs nor chatbots are good technology for information access. [...]
If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.
But even if the chatbots on offer were built around something other than LLMs, something that could reliably get the right answer, they'd still be a terrible technology for information access.
"Je ne dis pas cela méchamment, mais j’espère vraiment que ce document est tout simplement erroné. Une détérioration rapide du puits de carbone terrestre dans un avenir proche pourrait avoir des conséquences vraiment terribles." Voici ce qu’a déclaré Robert Rohde, directeur scientifique au Berkeley Earth, le jour de la sortie de l’étude.
octobre
Voters face an easy but tectonic choice in the race for the White House.
Will they choose the first woman or the oldest man to be the next president?
Will they choose the prosecutor or the convict?
What too many of us don’t know now is that the rise of Nazi Germany and the lead-up to the Holocaust was a slow play fertilized by denialism about what was happening in plain view—not the Final Solution out of the gate. Non-targeted Germans continued their daily lives, even as their kids trained to be hardened and hateful Nazis, and believed the bigoted lies that it was “subhuman” people—which is not a thing—causing all their economic problems.
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
Notre société "obsédée" par la croissance économique subit une crise de la santé mentale dans le monde, qui touche particulièrement les plus défavorisés, a déploré jeudi le rapporteur spécial de l'ONU sur les droits de l'Homme et l'extrême pauvreté.
"What people realized early on, and this is the whole reason Comic Sans took off, is that a paragraph looks different depending on what font you put it in: serious or funny or whatever. You should be grateful to Comic Sans. The one great thing that it did is it introduced people to the debate about typefaces. In a twisted way, Comic Sans contributed to the growth of fonts in general."
Une étude qui circule depuis 2021 montre une surmortalité paradoxale des cyclistes casqués. Mais selon les hypothèses posées, plus que le casque, le type de pratique – sportive ou débutante – serait en cause, car elle est plus ou moins génératrice d’accidents.
Dans une récente mise à jour de ses conditions d’utilisation, Steam précise que les « gamers achètent une licence et non le jeu lui-même. » La manœuvre est destinée à se mettre en conformité avec les dispositions d’une nouvelle loi californienne contre la publicité mensongère. Le tableau ravive le débat sur la notion de propriété numérique à l’ère des abonnements qui tuent les copies physiques.
“we found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models …. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern matching—so fragile, in fact, that changing names can alter results by ~10%!”
Tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue that such measures will "trickle down" and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich.
Studies from around the world show bike lanes ease congestion, reduce emissions and are a boon to businesses
The way to understand this doublethink: that we can avoid dangerous climate change while continuing to burn fossil fuels – is that it relies on the concept of overshoot. The promise is that we can overshoot past any amount of warming, with the deployment of planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal dragging temperatures back down by the end of the century.
This not only cripples any attempt to limit warming to 1.5°C, but risks catastrophic levels of climate change as it locks us in to energy and material-intensive solutions which for the most part exist only on paper.
If you want to pinpoint your place in the universe, start with your cosmic address. You live on Earth->Solar System->Milky Way Galaxy->Local Cluster->Virgo Cluster->Virgo Supercluster->Laniakea. Thanks to new deep sky surveys, astronomers now think all those places are part of an even bigger cosmic structure in the "neighborhood" called The Shapley Concentration.
Maybe someday Altman’s ideas about AI will prove out, but for now, his approach is textbook Silicon Valley mythmaking.
What's going on here isn't especially confusing. Prior to Dobbs, calling yourself "pro-life" was a low-cost way for Republican voters to tell a story where they are morally upright heroes while casting feminists, urban liberals, college kids, and racial minorities as oversexed heathens. When abortion is legal, it's easy to condemn other people's abortions as a matter of "convenience" or say they're "using it for birth control" or employ other euphemisms for promiscuity, while quietly believing the abortions you and your friends get are justified.
Or as the Meta founder prefers it: “We are trying to build a future that is more open, more accessible, more natural, and more about human connection.” Go on. “Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.” Historically, of course, there has always been another way to feel truly present with another person, which is to be truly present with another person. But this is not what the emperor would wish for his citizens. He prefers the world atomised, mediated via his machines.
Margarita Gingins estime que Javier Milei n'est pas responsable de la situation économique du pays. En revanche, "je pense qu'il doit donner une réponse à la situation sociale. On ne peut pas gouverner un pays avec seulement un projet économique. Sa responsabilité, c'est de ne pas avoir mis en place un filet social pour accompagner la population."
But research is showing that AI generation may be even more resource-intensive than originally thought. Imagine that you want to ask an AI program to write up a 100-word email for you. You get an almost instant response, but what you don’t see are the intensive computing resources that went into creating that email. At the AI data center, generating just two of those emails could use as much energy as a full charge on the latest iPhone. And according to a Pew Research Center study, that 100-word email could use up a whole bottle of water for the cooling that’s needed at data centers.
De même qu'on ne s'attend pas à ce que les frigos se réinventent chaque année en terme de fonctionnalités, le smartphone a atteint une certaine maturité et n'évolue plus que de manière anecdotique. Mais les fabricants doivent quand même satisfaire les actionnaires, et donc nous persuader qu'il est important d'un racheter un chaque année.
septembre
Mauvaise nouvelle : le niveau de température qui entraîne la mort de l'humain (en fonction de l'humidité ambiante et de l'âge du sujet) s'avère plus bas qu'estimé précédemment.
Brillant texte de Ted Chiang sur les différences fondamentales entre la création artistique telle que pratiquée par un humain et la génération de texte, d'images ou de sons par un LLM (Large Language Model).
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
Le vrai risque des soit-disant "IA" : non pas une révolte des machine qui voudraient soudainement détruire l'humanité, mais l'automatisation de tâches administratives par des systèmes aveugles et inhumains, qui écrasent les individus et contre lesquels il est pratiquement impossible de faire appel. Le tout fondé sur la croyance (absolument fausse) qu'un algorithme est nécessairement neutre et objectif.
août
Telegram est généralement présentée comme une application de messagerie du même type que WhatsApp et Signal, parce qu'elles se ressemblent au niveau de leurs interfaces d'utilisation ainsi qu'en terme de fonctionnalités. Pourtant sous le capot, Telegram est très différente des deux autres.
Les années 1980 représentent un seuil dans cette histoire et dans les années 1990, on peut parler d’un basculement et d’un délitement de tout l’héritage ouvrier du XXe siècle et de cette espèce de pilier syndical de l’État britannique d’après-guerre – il y avait quand même 13 200 000 syndiqués en 1980 ! Au gré de la désindustrialisation, de la montée du chômage de masse et des lois antisyndicales, il y a un reflux de cette construction sociale et politique gigantesque, centrale dans la culture politique britannique, et ce reflux devient une véritable relégation symbolique dans des médias appliqués à célébrer la nouveauté de la fin de la guerre froide et de la disparation des bastions du monde ouvrier le plus familier.
When we are able to admit that the capacity to harm lies within ourselves — within us all — we become capable of radically transforming the conversation around abuse and rape culture. We can go from simply reacting to abuse and punishing “abusers” to preventing abuse and healing our communities. Because the revolution starts at home, as they say. The revolution starts in your house, in your own relationships, in your bedroom. The revolution starts in your heart.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
But moral outrage must be closely managed, or it can do more harm than good. Ganz, who eventually became a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has spent years teaching people how to use their anger to effect change. Stoking the emotion is easy. Learning how to channel it to useful ends, he told me, is harder. For anger to be productive, at some point, it must stop. Victory often demands compromise. “You have to know how to arouse passions to fuel the fight, and then how to cool everyone down so they’ll accept the deal on the table,” Ganz said.
Walz, with his cheerful goober dad persona, offers a view of masculinity that is far tougher than that displayed by even the most steroid-inflated men of the MAGA world. He's a guy who isn't afraid of basic empathy. A man who is confident enough not to run from those who are different. A man so sure of himself that he can let a woman be his boss without acting threatened by her power. That's what real strength looks like. No wonder a weak man like Trump thinks Walz is the apocalypse.
Companies may unintentionally hurt their sales by including the words “artificial intelligence” when describing their offerings that use the technology, according to a study led by Washington State University researchers.
Of course, generative AI is an impressive technology, and it provides tremendous opportunities for improving productivity in a number of tasks. But because the hype has gone so far ahead of reality, the setbacks of the technology in 2024 will be more memorable.
Heroism is overrated. It is always movements that lead to large-scale change, though our dominant cultural narrative of change focuses on individuals. It is not naive to think you can change the world, it is naive to think you could be in the world and not change it, but that change happens in community.
Rather than solving the problems raised by employers’ methods, however, the use of automated job-hunting only served to set off an AI arms race that has no obvious conclusion. ZipRecruiter’s quarterly New Hires Survey reported that in Q1 of this year, more than half of all applicants admitted using AI to assist their efforts. Hiring managers, flooded with more applications than ever before, took the next logical step of seeking out AI that can detect submissions forged by AI. Naturally, prospective employees responded by turning to AI that could defeat AI detectors. Employers moved on to AI that can conduct entire interviews. The applicants can cruise past this hurdle by using specialized AI assistants that provide souped-up answers to an interviewer’s questions in real time. Around and around we go, with no end in sight.
juillet
One of the world's largest investment banks wonders if generative AI will be worth the huge investment and hype: "will this large spend ever pay off?"
I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.
You’ve heard this refrain before – giving money to homeless people is not the best way to help them because it might be squandered, or spent on harmful habits. But a new Canadian study makes a powerful case to the contrary.
Théorie fascinante qui propose un modèle pour expliquer l'émergence de la conscience dans le vivant.
Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
Resilient Web Design, un livre en accès libre sur l'évolution du web.
Vidéo de la chaîne YouTube Computerphile qui explore l'hypothèse (papier scientifique à l'appui) selon laquelle l'IA pourrait bientôt atteindre un plateau en terme de performances —contrairement à l'idée (très complaisante et pas du tout étayée) d'une progression linéaire illimitée, voire exponentielle.
97 travailleurs Kényans cosignent une lettre ouverte demandant au président des États-Unis, Joe Biden, de mettre fin « aux conditions de travail qui s'apparentent à de l'esclavage moderne » dans l'industrie du numérique.
Le web est désormais tellement rempli de contenu généré en masse dans un seul but marketing (SEO, spam etc) que Google est en train d'abandonner sa mission d'indexer le web tout entier. En sélectionnant les sources de valeurs (ou d'autorité), il se rapproche progressivement d'un catalogue exclusif, réservé aux grands acteurs du web.
Une étude montre que la majorité des Américains se préoccuent des questions liées au changement climatique et sont en faveur de mesures pour lutter contre celui-ci. Mais plus intéressant : la majorité des Américains sont également persuadés que seule une minorité de leurs compatriotes partagent ce point de vue. Cette "fausse réalité sociale" peut à son tour dissuader les politiciens de prendre des mesures fortes.
Distorted beliefs about support for climate policy, and about concerns over climate change in general, are so commonly held among the more than 6,000 American adults in the researchers’ nationally representative sample that the study’s authors call these misperceptions a “false social reality.” Recent polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 66 to 80 percent of people in the U.S. support major climate mitigation policies. But participants in the new study estimated that only between 37 and 43 percent do so. A range of 80 to 90 percent of those polled by the researchers underestimated the U.S. population’s climate concern and support for major climate mitigation policies.
Feminism boosts sexual satisfaction for both men and women, a new study suggests.
Most journalists have an admirable instinct to be fair to the people they cover. But it often emerges as the traditional “both-sides” approach, which has become discredited in an era when one side consistently lies.
But isn’t “weird” just making fun of people? Well … yes. And that’s good. It’s good to mock and make fun of people who are bad or want to do bad things. It’s also necessary politically. One of the challenges of the Trump era is that Trumpism is very threatening and dangerous. It aims to upend and destroy the foundations of our civic democracy. But in cataloguing these threats and pumping up outrage over every Trumpian transgression we can also build up the image of their power like inflating a vast flaccid balloon, a sort of collective psyching yourself out. Good thrusting mockery cuts right through that. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also insecure, stunted degenerates. They’re weird. Normal people don’t want to be around them. They think this kind of talk is normal because it’s common parlance in the far-right podcast subculture they live in. That’s really the JD Vance story right there. In his world, raging at miserable cat ladies trying to rule our lives doesn’t seem strange.
While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia's latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don't give financial advice, I can say that if you're an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday's keynote presentation.
For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that 'digital humans' are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.