[Petit Fours 382] On software automation, human labor, and figuring out why one is writing
Hi, all! It's the final week of Q1/2024 (that went fast!) and here's what I want to share with you:
#1 Amidst the ongoing hype, here's a timely question: Have We Reached Peak AI?
#2 Benjamin Shestakofsky's new book Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality is out. Here's an excerpt to start with: The Messy Reality Behind a Silicon Valley Unicorn: A VC-backed startup’s push for growth left little time for actual engineering "AllDone’s story highlights the unseen but ongoing role of human workers on the frontiers of automation, and it demonstrates why it’s too soon to forecast a future of full automation or a world without work. The interdependence between generously compensated software engineers in San Francisco and low-cost contractors in the Philippines suggests that advances in software automation still rely not only on human labor, but also on global inequalities."
#3 From closer to home, featuring Razan Jaber and her doctoral research, here's a nice piece on gaze as a part of human–robot interaction: Lättare att snacka med robot som ger ögonkontakt
#4 Vivian Gornick's book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is a classic for good reason: "What, we would ask of the manuscript, was the larger preoccupation here? the true experience? the real subject? Not that such questions could be answered, only that it seemed vital to me that they be asked. To approach the work in hand as any ordinary reader might was to learn not how to write but – more important by far – why one was writing."
-A