Links for January 23, 2022

🧠 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence — Wait But Why

Tim Urban's multi-part essay on artificial intelligence has informed a lot of my own writing about technology, particularly this week's post "Humility in the Face of Progress."

His core argument, that progress compounds, invites readers to have the kind of humility I wrote about.

This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced.

🎧 Choose Carefully — Hidden Brain

Shankar Vedantam explores the subconscious factors that contribute to the decisions we make. If you liked my post on defaulting to progress, this is for you:

All of us make choices all the time, and we may think we’re making those choices freely. But psychologist Eric Johnson says there’s an architecture behind the way choices are presented to us, and this invisible architecture can influence decisions both large and small.

🃏 A Fun History Game

A new online game pulls random Wikipedia entries and asks you to place them in order. Link

Via Kottke.org

🐦 Tweets

@visakanv, who I quoted in yesterday's post, shares a great video of Vic Wooten discussing practicing recovering from wrong notes. A great complement to my post on the subject.

this is true regardless of how you choose to define success; whether we're talking abt climbing the corporate ladder or being an artist. I'm reminded of Vic Wooten talking about how he deliberately practices wrong notes (worth watching even if non-musical) https://t.co/5cywxUyepm

— visa is doing final edits (99.9%) ✍🏾📖 (@visakanv) March 30, 2018

And I couldn't resist sharing this amazing squid:

A large strawberry squid, one of three caught on the last trawl of the Deep-See cruise. Photo: NOAA Fisheries pic.twitter.com/BB1RIPUa5Q

— 𝐀𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬 𝐀𝐩𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐚 (@A_aphrodisia) December 2, 2021