Wisdom and Imagination in Children's Books.
And a bit of AI thesis of course. Headcount and AI, Karpathy, McKinsey, Jones, imagination and truth. And the Gruffalo.
The Homework Machine,
Oh, the Homework Machine,
Most perfect
contraption that's ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds' time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— 'nine plus four?' and the answer is 'three.'
Three?
Oh me . . .
I guess it's not as perfect
As I thought it would be.
A light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein, 1981. Picture from Mark Bennett’s Facebook.
I continue to milk the Acadian AI thesis talk, you are no doubt a bit tired of that, but I’m nearly done.
I remain excited about the opportunities that creative humans will do with AI. Rather than merely looking for places where AI can imitate and replace humans, I’m looking for those founders that see AI as a mechanism to create fundamentally new ways of doing things. If business leaders (and their vendor and consulting cheerleaders) keep framing in business as an opportunity to fire people, they will not increase productivity, and they will miss out on AI’s real opportunity.
Watch Andrew Karpathy’s recent talk. There is a lot to take out of this talk, and I’d urge founders to study and critique it carefully. CEOs of large companies should watch it too.
In our AI thesis we make a few points that resonate with what Andrej says.
Also have a look at McKinsey’s Agentic Mesh.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/seizing-the-agentic-ai-advantage
Then watch Nate Jones’s video and post, where he sees the two in debate.
“Each failure stems from executives chasing automation fantasies instead of understanding AI's true capabilities and constraints.”
Automation fantasies are indeed a problem. I’ve talked about the Klarna failure before. As have many others.
I was recently on Christoph Niebel’s podcast. Here’s an excerpt where I talk about the dangers of linking AI success to headcount reduction.
While automation fantasies are going to be a blight on the success of AI for some time to come, and will probably cause some significant corporate failures (see earlier post).
I worry more about our lack of imagination to see AI as something other than anthropomorphization (that’s a word a German could be proud of). More on why I loathe this anthropomorphic nonsense here.
The power of great children’s books is to empower both imagination and truth. We need more of that in AI today. More truth about what really works, and more imagination about what we can do with it. The Gruffalo does a brilliant job of illustrating the power of hype, amongst many other things. I understand that Julia and Axel have a new Gruffalo book coming out, and even though it well over a decade since I read a bedtime story, I’ll be buying a copy.
Andrej points us toward that path of imagination and truth, McKinsey isn’t yet.
As I usually do, I’ll end with a song.
No, I won’t pick a Coldplay tune.
Here’s Jeff Buckley instead. No direct connection to the post, just a lovely illustration of human imagination.
Oh, and there is Jeff Buckley documentary due out v soon.