By now, if you are in tech and haven’t been on an extended Techmeme and Twitter break you have heard about GPT-3 a new and massive language model developed by OpenAI. I have played around with it a bit myself and its capabilities are impressive. Here are some thoughts. The model perfectly illustrates the ever moving bar on what we consider artificial intelligence. Not that long ago facial recognition didn’t work at all, now computers routinely outperform humans. Putting together more than a c...

In my draft book World After Capital, I write that humans having knowledge is what makes us distinctly human and gives us great power (and hence great responsibility). I define knowledge in this context as science, philosophy, art, music, etc. that’s recorded in a medium so that it can be shared across time and space. Such knowledge is at the heart of human progress, because it can be improved through the process of critical inquiry. We can fly in planes and feed seven billion people because ...

I recently listened to a talk by David Autor about employment and technology. He praised the high school movement as being incredibly forward looking for addressing the rapid decline in farm employment. When asked about what the equivalent would be today, David answered “vocational schools.” Now as it turns out my Dad was a teacher at a vocational school in Germany where the apprenticeship system has been maintained throughout the Industrial Age. I learned a ton from my Dad about technical dr...

Many of the people in power or currently grabbing for it are trying to maintain the recent past or even go back further. This is the fight of our lifetime. The Past against the Future. It is NOT: left against right, rich against poor, black against white, Islam against Christianity, men against women. Do not let yourself get dragged into these fights, that for now just serve to keep us in the past. Yes, there are vast injustices in the world that need to be addressed, but if we get stuck in t...

Tomorrow evening I will be giving a talk on the “Future of Code” at the NASDAQ Startup CTO Summit. The amount of code in the world has been growing exponentially for years. And that means that when you are in 2026 looking back, something like 75% or more of all code will have been written in the last ten years. In the future, code will be everywhere, from your toothbrush to your car, and everything will be powered by code, from your daily reading to which company selects you for a project. An...

I love programming. I also encourage people to learn some programming because (a) it is a useful way of thinking and (b) much of the world will be programmable. Here is a quick example that I just encountered when I prepared yesterday’s Tech Tuesday Index. I had a document with links to every post looking like this:But what I really wanted were the post titles as the text for each link. Now I could have manually gone and followed each link, copied the post title and then replaced the text. Te...

I have written and talked about the need for a “right to be represented by a bot.” By a bot here I mean software that runs on my behalf as an enduser and mediates my interactions with online services. In the web world, the browser is such as bot. For instance, I can run an ad blocker which I instruct on which parts of a site to show to me. I can also run something like 1Password that manages my security. I could use a custom bot to say keep an automatic personal copy of all the images and tex...

Too many people seem to be having a moment of Schadenfreude in the wake of the Ashley Madison hack – what were “those” people thinking of having an affair (estimates for the overall percentage of married adults having affairs range from 30-60%) or at least of being so “dumb” as to use a service to arrange their affair. But this is just the latest instance of information being disclosed that people thought would be private. Just shortly before it was disclosed that 4.5 million medical records ...

Why write here about the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo? Because most of what I have been writing on Continuations is about developing a coherent view of what comes next for humanity. It is about finding a way forward in a world of extraordinary new technological capabilities and dislocations. The attack on Charlie Hebdo stands for and is part of a fundamental rejection of not just the type of future I envision but also of the modernity we currently live in. This...

I still remember how much I loved reading cyberpunk. During yesterday’s Satoshi story development I was struck by how much of the future envisioned in these stories has become a reality. Having a mysterious creator of a system of global reach that provides an important breakthrough in distributed computing is as riveting as anything I read back then. What’s even better is that it feels to me like we are in the early chapters with much more yet to come! So that got me thinking about what else ...