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Laurene Powell Jobs:
In a recent interview, Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, called for military intervention to “save” San Francisco, a city he once celebrated—and where he no longer lives. When challenged, Benioff invoked his own donations as proof of authority: No one, he claims, has given more to San Francisco. Then, as if to underscore the point, he added, “If there is anyone who’s doing more for the local community, I want their name, because I’m very competitive.”
The message beneath that comment was unmistakable: In his eyes, generosity is an auction—and policy is the prize awarded to the highest bidder.
But giving that expects control is anything but generous.
and further…
True generosity works in the opposite direction. It flows quietly to communities that already know what they need. It builds capacity, not dependency. It measures success by voices strengthened, not by names engraved.
Setting aside the whole, “is there such a thing as a good billionaire?” question for another time, can we at least recognize a fairly consistent pattern: there seem to be several incredibly wealthy women (Jobs, MacKenzie Scott, Melinda Gates, to name a few) who are working hard to improve the world with their wealth while the bulk of wealthy men (or at least the loudest?) are doing anything but that.
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Karp thinks he is destroying bureaucracy. He is encoding it. The contempt for meetings and weekly reports and presentations to senior leaders; he treats these as the bureaucratic process itself. They were not. They were where people interpreted the procedure, the place where someone could notice that the categories no longer fit the case. The targeting doctrine is still there. The rules of engagement are still there. They are the columns on the Kanban board. What Karp eliminated was the discretion the institution could never admit it depended on, and what he got was a bureaucracy that runs exactly as written. Encoded bureaucracy does not bend. It shatters.
People are still making decisions in that sense. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces a thousand targeting decisions per hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people are sitting on Capitol Hill, refusing to stop it. Calling it an “AI problem” gives those decisions, and those people, a place to hide.
I would like to be wrong—and hope that I am, on some level—but I suspect one of the primary issues we face with increased AI automation is not whether or not something can be automated, but rather the following question:
What friction in the former, non-automated process, was actually adding value?
And as people and businesses throw themselves into automation without asking this critical question, the task for the rest of us will be to find new ways to introduce friction into the processes at appropriate times to try to ensure decisions get made well rather than living in a cacouphony of blind agents leading blind humans.
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The culmination of a year-long architectural study collaboratively conducted by Studio VAARO and Gabriel Fain Architects, it marks the first of a series of research projects exploring building designs that could be suitable for, but are currently unbuildable in, Toronto.
Impossible Toronto gives us something to work toward, if only we were to work on tweaking some of the zoning laws preventing us from creating structures and neighborhoods built for a high quality of life in North American cities. For most people, the dichotomy of their NIMBY tendencies are such that they recognize the need for new housing, but assume that new housing will always come in a form destructive to the things they like about their city. This sort of project helps to show possible housing growth in forms the average NIMBY has never envisioned and might actually like.