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Banning AI will not make it go away
a day ago
- A 16-year-old lifeguard in Santa Cruz rescued a boy from drowning in large waves; the same swell led to hundreds of rescues in San Diego County.
- Swimming against a rip current is futile—even strong swimmers like Michael Phelps would struggle—whereas experienced watermen use these currents to their advantage.
- Historical technological revolutions (industrial, PC, internet) had significant barriers to entry, but the barrier to benefit from AI is nearly zero for creative individuals.
- AI technology has been adopted rapidly across generations and cultures, drastically reducing task times and freeing up leisure time.
- The text draws a parallel: fighting against powerful forces (rip currents or old paradigms) leads to exhaustion; embracing them offers ease and progress.
Mozilla: The state of open source AI
12 days ago
- Open-weight AI is being successfully adopted in diverse, real-world applications globally, from Māori language models to agricultural diagnostics, emphasizing ownership and control.
- A Mozilla/SlashData survey shows 79% of developers using AI choose open models, though only 51% of open-model teams reach production compared to 63% for closed, due to operational tooling and trust gaps.
- Open models have become a commercial market at a multi-hundred-billion-dollar scale, with companies like Databricks, Mistral, and DeepSeek achieving significant revenue and valuation growth.
- The strategic focus is shifting to owning layers above the model, such as the agentic harness (orchestration, tools, memory, permissions), where open versus closed competition is intensifying.
- Governments are increasingly supporting open AI, with policies like the European Commission's 'open source first' rule and Canada's target to boost business adoption from 12% to 60%.
- Key challenges include infrastructure costs, security concerns, maintenance, and deployment complexity, with regional variations highlighted in a global survey table.
- Risks to open AI's progress include a widening capability gap in reasoning and agentic tasks, potential dominance of closed platforms in permission standards, economic sustainability, and misuse concerns.
- The future direction advocates for competition, interoperability, and the freedom to switch vendors, warning against a 'rented' future controlled by a few, with a call to build openly and collectively.
What will be left for us to work on?
16 days ago
- The AI as Normal Technology framework is useful for understanding AI's economic impact unless a future discontinuity like recursive self-improvement occurs.
- Recursive self-improvement (RSI) is unlikely to suddenly cause mass unemployment, as economic transformation from AI will be gradual over decades.
- Future jobs will change significantly, shifting from executing tasks to evaluating and controlling AI systems, emphasizing judgment and domain knowledge.
- AI currently excels at verifiable technical tasks but struggles with creativity and reliability, making it more a collaboration tool than a replacement for workers.
- The adoption of AI involves four stages: capability development, product innovation, early adoption, and slow structural adaptation taking decades.
- Historical examples like electricity show that realizing a technology's full potential requires reorganizing work and society, not just drop-in replacements.
- AI evaluation is becoming crucial and resistant to automation, shifting community focus from building AI to steering its development and ensuring alignment.
- Human roles will evolve toward operating and understanding AI systems, similar to how crane operators control machinery, rather than doing cognitive work directly.
- Superintelligence is unlikely to emerge solely from computational advances due to external bottlenecks like clinical trials, regulation, and societal integration.
- Personal adaptation involves balancing productivity gains with continuous learning and maintaining control over AI to avoid skill atrophy and dependence.

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technology adoption

Banning AI will not make it go away

Mozilla: The state of open source AI

What will be left for us to work on?