Hey futurists,
Well, I'm getting better about getting these messages out, but I'm still lagging the news by more than a week. Hard to crank these out when it's not my full-time job, you know. I always feel like I need to write some insightful preamble to the news bits, and delayed this one while I was trying to think of one, never thought of one, so, on that note, let's just dive into the news bits.
AI
1. "AI and the fatfinger economy": Cory Doctorow posits an explanation of why AI is being shoved into everything, why AI-summoning buttons have been placed in places you're likely to accidentally hit them, and why once you do, those interactions are so hard to exit.
"Growth is a heady advantage for tech companies, and not because of an ideological commitment to 'growth at all costs,' but because companies with growth stocks enjoy substantial, material benefits. A growth stock trades at a higher 'price to earnings ratio' ('P:E') than a 'mature' stock. Because of this, there are a lot of actors in the economy who will accept shares in a growing company as though they were cash (indeed, some might prefer shares to cash). This means that a growing company can outbid their rivals when acquiring other companies and/or hiring key personnel, because they can bid with shares (which they get by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet), while their rivals need cash (which they can only get by selling things or borrowing money)."
"The problem is that all growth ends. Google has a 90% share of the search market. Google isn't going to appreciably increase the number of searchers, short of desperate gambits like raising a billion new humans to maturity and convincing them to become Google users (this is the strategy behind Google Classroom, of course). To continue posting growth, Google needs gimmicks."
So Google and companies like it want to convince the world they're a "growth company" set to double or triple in size by dominating an entirely new sector.
Inside the companies, these "corporate growth stories" are converted to "key performance indicators" tied to employee performance reviews and bonuses. So this is why you see every product team at every major tech company cramming AI into everything. They are boosting their metrics.
Crucially, what's not the reason every major tech company cramming AI into everything is demand from you, the end user.
My commentary: In the long term view, it is probably the case that AI is an entirely new sector and somebody will dominate it. That may well be one or more of the companies today cramming AI into everything. So for some, this may pay off, but for others, the lack of end user demand for what they're pushing will cause them to lose out. Most of the time in technology, there are many options early in the technology revolution, followed by consolidations, leaving maybe 1 to 3 companies dominating that product type and everyone else going out of business. We've seen this with PCs, with the internet, with mobile devices, etc.
Followup commentary: I didn't mean to imply there isn't demand for AI technology. Most of us nowadays use AI from day to day when it's useful. I just don't think there's demand for AI technology everywhere it's being crammed.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/02/kpis-off/
2. "Avoiding skill atrophy in the age of AI."
Just as GPS navigation eroded road navigation skills, "AI-powered autocomplete and code generators can tempt us to 'turn off our brain' for routine coding tasks."
"A 2025 study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon researchers found that the more people leaned on AI tools, the less critical thinking they engaged in, making it harder to summon those skills when needed."
"What does this look like in day-to-day coding? It starts subtle. One engineer confessed that after 12 years of programming, AI's instant help made him 'worse at [his] own craft'. He describes a creeping decay: First, he stopped reading documentation -- why bother when an LLM can explain it instantly?"
"Then debugging skills waned -- stack traces and error messages felt daunting, so he just copy-pasted them into AI for a fix."
"Deep comprehension was the next to go -- instead of spending hours truly understanding a problem, he now implements whatever the AI suggests."
"We're not becoming 10 times developers with AI -- we're becoming 10 times dependent on AI." "Every time we let AI solve a problem we could've solved ourselves, we're trading long-term understanding for short-term productivity."
So the solution is to stop using AI, right? Of course not.
If you follow the list of guidelines on this page, supposedly your skills won't atrophy in the age of AI.
You're supposed to always verify and understand the output of the AI, never use AI for "fundamentals", always attempt problems yourself before asking AI, have human code reviews for AI contributions, if an AI solution works, engage in active learning and learn how it works yourself, keep learning journal of "AI assists", and program with the AI with a "pair programming mindset".
The immediate problem that comes to mind for me with everything on this list is, "Ain't nobody got time for that." We developers are supposed to 5x-10x our productivity. All the things on this list take time.
So, y'all tell me, how am I going to avoid skill atrophy in the age of AI?
In case you're wondering where the "Ain't nobody got time for that" sound bite came from:
3. Vastly huger context windows in language models are possible, or so it is claimed, by Jacob Buckman, CEO of Manifest AI, who claims to have invented a way of incorporating the key idea behind recurrent neural networks with transformers to make "power attention", enabling vastly huger context windows without the models forgetting anything in the context window, which is a problem for language models today that have the size of their context windows pushed up.
The talk does not link to a research paper but I think I have tracked down the research paper.
"A key feature of linear transformers is that the exact same outputs [...] can be computed via a recurrent formulation. In the case of sympow transformers, doing so involves the feature map [...] which is the symmetric power embedding function. Using this embedding function, we can write the recurrent equations:"
Followed by the equations which I won't attempt to describe as text. The term "sympow" is their term for their "symmetric power transformers" imbibed with the "power attention" described in the video. This is on page 2. For those of you who prefer text to video and want to have a go at understanding the math.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03269
4. Duolingo has become an "AI-first company", and that means being willing to accept lower quality for vastly higher quantity of content creation. 9-year-Duolingo-streaker Evan Edinger goes on a long rant. Stories are worse. It's like a burger joint adding sawdust to increase profits.
I've been using Duolingo since 2017 (though my streak has been broken many times -- I don't have a single unbroken 7-year streak -- that would be amazing -- I'm a much more casual Duo user) and Duolingo always seemed to have so much human-generated content on it it was impossible to go through it all. Maybe that's not true and people have completed all the lessons for some language pairs? (Duo is organized along language pairs, e.g. "Chinese for speakers of English".)
Have any of you used up all the lessons available on Duolingo for some language you're studying?
5. The CEO of Fiverr, Micha Kaufman, sent a letter to everyone in the company:
"Here is the unpleasant truth: Al is coming for your jobs."
"It does not matter if you are a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson, or a finance person -- Al is coming for you."
"You must understand that what was once considered 'easy tasks' will no longer exist; what was considered 'hard tasks' will be the new easy, and what was considered 'impossible tasks' will be the new hard."
"If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I am not trying to scare you."
"I am not talking about your job at Fiverr. I am talking about your ability to stay in your profession in the industry."
https://x.com/aaditsh/status/1919407985400697257
6. OpenAI o3 plays (the equivalent of) GeoGuessr. Photos from personal collections, not actually on Google Street view. Can't do the impossible, but does astonishingly well. Try to guess the locations of the photos yourself before you scroll down and reveal the answers.
7. Claude's system prompt got leaked. Wait, people are saying Anthropic doesn't keep their system prompts secret, so this isn't really a 'leak'? Well, either way, here you are, you can read Claude's system prompt if you feel like it.
Claude prompts:
https://docs.anthropic.com/en/release-notes/system-prompts
Geopolitics
8. In 2019, a team of researchers wrote:
"Pakistan and India may have 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025 with yields from tested 12- to 45-kt values to a few hundred kilotons. If India uses 100 strategic weapons to attack urban centers and Pakistan uses 150, fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people, and nuclear-ignited fires could release 16 to 36 Tg of black carbon in smoke, depending on yield. The smoke will rise into the upper troposphere, be self-lofted into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks. Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2 degrees to 5 degrees C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%, with larger regional impacts. Recovery takes more than 10 years. Net primary productivity declines 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities."
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478
Cryptocurrency
9. "We have reached the 'severed fingers and abductions' stage of the crypto revolution."
"This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks."
"The abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations."
"This was the second such incident this year. In January, crypto maven David Balland was also abducted along with his partner on January 21. Balland was taken to a house, where he also had a finger cut off."
"A few weeks before that, attackers went to the home of someone whose son was a 'crypto-influencer based in Dubai.' At the father's home, the kidnappers 'tied up [the father's] wife and daughter and forced him into a car."
"Early this year, three British men kidnapped another British man while all of them were in Spain; the kidnappers demanded 30,000 euros in crypto 'or be tortured and killed.'"
"There's the Belgian man who posted online that 'his crypto wallet was now worth 1.6 million euros.' His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks."
"I reported last year on a gang based out of Florida that had been staging home invasions of people perceived to own lots of crypto. One of their hits took place in Durham, North Carolina."
All the abducted people in this story survived, and the criminals were caught. Cryptocurrency is not as anonymous as people think it is. Still, if you have any cryptocurrency, you might not want to brag about it online.
Robotics
10. "High-tech mechanical waiters popping up in local restaurants."
Local to Ashburn, Virginia, that is.
"Most of us have probably seen the 'Terminator' movies. We knew the age of robots was coming -- but who would have thought they would be so darn cute? That's the word Brandy Schaefer uses to describe the robot servers at the Honey Pig Korean BBQ restaurant in the Ashburn Farm Market Center."
The article notes that acceptance of robots is high in Asian cultures. But the robots are not limited to Asian restaurants.
"The Deli Man robot has four levels in order to carry piping hot pizzas, plates of pasta and savory sub sandwiches out to the dining room."
11. "Russian McDonalds", which is actually called Vkusno -- i Tochka (Вкусно -- и Точка, means "Tasty -- and that's it"), has robots.
In this video, Vasilisa Mamont shows an ad for the robots (definitely aiming for "cuteness") and then visits a Vkusno -- i Tochka in real life in... oh, she doesn't say where it is. But from her other videos we can see she's in Moscow for the "Victory Day" parade, so I assume it's in Moscow.
I haven't seen her channel before, but it looks like a strongly pro-Russia channel. Well, if a channel is made inside Russia it has to be pro-Russia. The YouTubers I followed who were inside Russia before the war are now outside Russia. There's another video on the channel where she interviews a US citizen who is migrating to Russia using the new "Shared Values" (Traditional Values) Visa. The YouTubers outside Russia say the idea Russia represents "traditional values" is a joke. Russia under the communists wasn't "traditional" at all. Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be about the geopolitics (I mention it just because if I know a-priori that a channel has a bias, I try to tell you all about that up front), I just wanted to tell you all about the robots. It seems like we're starting to see robots in restaurants, after decades of anticipation, but they're still only in a few places and not as impressive as I expected. I guess that raises the question, what was I expecting? I guess I was expecting a fully automated restaurant with no humans to exist by now, but that hasn't happened.
I guess what I was envisioning was an automat, except with robotic automation instead of humans on the other side. The automat was a cafeteria that was like a giant vending machine where you'd put in coins and open the doors and take the food out. The food was put in the slots by humans on the other side. The largest automat chain was Horn and Hardart. If you're wondering why they went away, it's because McDonald's and other "fast food" chains got the business.
There's a documentary about the automat:
You can watch the documentary online here:
In Finland, apparently there is such a thing as a pizza automat.
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Storytelling Going Away
12. Netflix is undergoing a massive user interface redesign, and the new UI won't support choose-your-own-adventure movies. So all of those are going to get removed, and one of them is the Black Mirror movie "Bandersnatch". (According to the article, there's a total of 5 hours and 12 minutes of video, but each viewing is 90 minutes based on the viewer's interactive choices.) There's also a 2020 episode of "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" called "Kimmy vs. The Reverend" and a series of documentary Interactive Specials starring Bear Grylls, all under the "You Vs. Wild" banner.
There's a whole bunch more made for kids: "Cat Burglar," "We Lost Our Human," "Battle Kitty," "Barbie: Epic Road Trip," and others.
I guess like those choose-your-own-adventure books we had when I was a kid, they weren't the most popular. Most humans, for whatever reason, like regular, linear stories.
https://www.slashfilm.com/1853450/netflix-removing-black-mirror-experimental-bandersnatch/