Great piece from the late Om Malik:
A man who controls one of the most powerful AI companies on earth telling a national television audience he should not have this power. While keeping it.
The confession is doing structural work. If you admit the danger, you establish yourself as the one honest actor. And if you are the one honest actor, your safety claims do not require external verification. You have pre-certified yourself through the performance of self-doubt. The confession is not transparency. It is inoculation against scrutiny.
Honestly, there’s a ton in this piece. It’ll be worth re-reading every once in a while.
Om Malik:
The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce
We’ve made an entire system that rewards “motion first and judgment later”:
We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.
Reminds me of this quote from Eric Gill:
We have elected to order manufacture upon inhuman lines; why should we ask for humanity in the product?
You get the sense from reading Om here that speed is not conducive to wisdom.
We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes.
The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it […] It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.
Side note: Nicholas Carr’s book Superbloom is a treatise on this exact topic: how velocity in a communication medium is everything.