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Sunday Reads and Listens...My Inbox and YouTube Home Page Joy
Howard Lindzon
February 05, 2023
Good morning...
My inbox is always Interesting.
Today I woke up to this request:
Zak here, I'm a senior editor at WIRED, and I'm writing a story about the evolving aesthetics of the male genitalia, with a particular focus on testicular grooming. It's a roving reported essay that mostly looks at the cultural and economic factors that gave rise to this industry. I see you recently tweeted that you're both an investor and user. Might you be available to briefly chat about your routine, and what it does for you?
On Friday, I was at my alma mater Thunderbird to judge a pitch contest. The school is back as number 1 as an international business and management degree and I am the the biggest fair weather fan on earth. It was fun to see international pitches in downtown Phoenix.
Now to some links...
YouTube home page is one of my favorite spots on the internet. I can't believe how many interesting and great videos I watch from a cold start.
I was watching Connor McDavid videos and I was served this video of a conversation between Wayne Gretzky and Connor:
Morgan Housel had a couple good posts ...
We are the free time economy and era so of course someone is spending $2 million a year to stop himself from aging. I read this while eating my morning bacon.
Will ChatGPT be the biggest con of all? Love this riff...
My conclusion isn’t just that ChatGPT is another con game—it’s the biggest one of them all. Microsoft even wants to hand over its entire search engine to this AI bot. Premium subscriptions are already available.
Some of you will tell me that I’m making a hasty judgment. ChatGPT will get better, they say. It will get smarter.
That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. The ethics code should have been inserted at the ground level—but it wasn’t. At this point, incremental improvements only make it better at its confidence game.
Technology of this sort is designed to be a con—if the ancient Romans had invented ChatGPT, it would have told them that it’s cool to conquer barbarians and sacrifice slaughtered bulls to the god Jupiter. Tech like this—truly made in the image of its human creator—can only feeds back what it learns from us. So we shouldn’t be surprised if ChatGPT soaks up all the crap on the Internet, and compresses it into slick-talking crap of a few sentences.
The slickness of the delivery is its major achievement. Gosh, it sounds so convincing, even when it’s so wrong.And that’s precisely how you know it’s a confidence game.
But in one way, it’s all so fitting. The con artist always gives people exactly what they want. And in a post-truth society, nobody does this better than AI. So I predict great things for ChatGPT—at least in economic terms. It will certainly live up to Sneaky Pete’s standards:
“I give people confidence. They give me money.”
Finally, Dana Carvey joined Smartless to spend an hour just entertaining the hosts. a must listen.
Have a great Sunday.
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