🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 147
May 23rd, 2024
Episode 147 — May 23rd, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/147
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Dimitri Glazkov, Ben Mathes, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl, Kamran Hakiman, Chris Butler
We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.
“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.”
― Benjamin Franklin
🏃🤺 Races and duels
Conflicts are inevitable in corporate strategy. As the saying goes, politics starts once there are two people and one blanket. These conflicts shape industries, define brands, spur progress, and ultimately determine the winners and losers. But not all conflicts are created equal. Some resemble races, where all participants push themselves and each other to new heights. Others devolve into duels: bitter battles where everyone bleeds.
Races are the epitome of healthy competition. Companies strive to outdo each other, not through sabotage or underhanded tactics, but by innovating faster, operating smarter, and delighting customers more. It's a positive-sum game where the rising tide lifts all boats. Look at Apple, Google, Samsung, and others in the mobile industry: their relentless race for smartphone supremacy has given us thinner, faster, more powerful devices year after year. The consumer is the ultimate winner.
Duels, on the other hand, are often destructive on balance. Companies engage in price wars that erode profits, launch vicious ad campaigns that tarnish reputations, and even resort to corporate espionage. It's a zero-sum game where everyone is harmed. Often, even the winner is seriously wounded. Consider the beverage wars between Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. Decades of bitter rivalry have left both companies with bloated marketing budgets and razor-thin margins.
Good leaders understand this distinction. They recognize that races are essential for progress. They push companies to reinvent themselves constantly to stay ahead of the curve. They also know that duels are a trap, a seductive path that usually leads to mutually assured destruction. The best leaders foster a culture of racing, not dueling. They encourage their teams to focus on internal excellence, to learn and improve, and to see competitors not as enemies but as benchmarks.
The same principles apply within a company. Departments and teams should be encouraged to compete in a healthy way, not by tearing each other down, but by striving for excellence in their respective areas. The company benefits when sales and marketing teams are aligned and working towards a common goal. But when they're locked in a power struggle, everyone suffers.
Internal races can take many forms. They could be sales contests, innovation challenges, or even friendly competitions to see who can develop the best customer service solution. The key is to create an environment where everyone feels motivated to improve, where collaboration is valued over competition, and where success is measured not by individual wins but by the team's overall progress. By fostering a culture of internal races, companies can unlock the full potential of their workforce and avoid inadvertently damaging people.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🚰 Scientists are finding underwater aquifers with huge amounts of fresh water
Everyone knows about freshwater aquifers under land, but geologists have recently discovered aquifers under the oceans: rock formations on the continental shelves holding huge amounts of fresh water. One gigantic aquifer off the US’s East Coast could contain “two orders of magnitude” more water than all the groundwater pumped annually in the US. Other offshore aquifers have been found near New Zealand, Hawaii, California, Israel, and Malta (the last few of which can often be water-stressed). Scientists know that these aquifers formed during the last glacial maximum, when sea levels were lower and much of this now-submerged land was high and dry, but they aren’t quite sure how the water got there.
🚏🇻🇪 Older Venezuelans are turning to online gig work to escape age discrimination
Older adults in Venezuela receive a pittance in pensions — just $3.50 a month — and suffer from age discrimination in face-to-face jobs, so increasing numbers of them have been turning to online gig work like data labeling, training AI systems, translating, tutoring, and ghostwriting. They like this kind of “click work” because nobody knows how old you are, and they can take home $200 to $400 a month, which outstrips what many of them could earn from local jobs. (Still, some online job postings explicitly look for workers under 30, which one worker speculated was because they can get away with paying younger people less.)
🚏🌧️ Climate change made Britain’s “never-ending” rain 10x more likely
The UK and Ireland suffered under “never-ending” rain late last year, and according to a new study, excessive rainfall was made ten times more likely and 20% wetter by human-made climate change. The storms seen on the British Isles were once considered a once-in-fifty-years event, but it’s now expected to occur once every five years, on average — and if global temperatures increase another degree Celsius, it’s expected to happen once every three years.
🚏💾 Even more companies are leasing data centers before they’re built
The AI boom has also brought about a data center boom: data center vacancy rates in the US are near record lows at 3.7%, and rents have risen 19% in the last year (and in datacenter-heavy Northern Virginia, these rents are up 42%). Because data centers take so long to build, many companies have been signing leases before the data centers are even finished; this “preleasing” rate is up to 84% from a long-term average of just 50%.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
A Plea for Sober AI (Drew Bruenig) — Argues that generative AI is actually quite useful, but AI boosters’ overblown promises and breathless hype have set our expectations so high that reality can’t help but fall short. The real productivity gains will come from more “sober” applications like coding assistance, data transformations, and automation — the key here is “prioritiz[ing] consistency and efficiency” over ‘sentience’ and outrageous creativity.
LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity (Schneier on Security) — Bruce Schneier argues that “mixing data with commands” is a major attack vector for many technologies: consider SQL injection, buffer overflow attacks, and even old-school phone hacking (‘phreaking’). LLM prompt injection fits the same pattern! Unfortunately, LLMs are all about adapting commands based on the provided data, so there’s no easy fix — and we’ll just have to “think carefully about using LLMs in potentially adversarial situations…like, say, on the Internet.”
A Whole New Cope (Venkatesh Rao) — Observes that most of us have negligible power to do anything about troubling events halfway across the world yet are deeply affected by them. Rao suggests this is because we interpret these events not in isolation but as signs and portents of our entire world beginning to come apart.
Informed Opinions Are Expensive (Paul Musgrave) — Contends that, even though gathering and manipulating data has become incredibly cheap in the modern age, meaningfully interpreting the data is just as expensive as ever. The upshot is that we still can’t expect people to have expertise in everything, even though they might have all the raw information. Concludes that “someone with an answer for every situation is apt to be unreliable in, at least, most of them.”
📚🛋️ Book for your shelf
A book that will help you dip your toes into systems thinking or explore its broader applications.
This week, we recommend Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious by Antonio Damasio (2021, 256 pages).
We recommend Feeling & Knowing with a bit of a disclaimer. This book is short and precise. Damasio put a lot of effort into ensuring no word was wasted. There are few rambling sidebars or unnecessary explorations. This book aims straight at the target and is as sharp as an arrow. If you buy an audiobook, be prepared to rewind multiple times: the insights are packed right next to each other, and even the slightest distraction will result in something significant being lost.
Now, with all these warnings out of the way, this is probably the best book to read in the current summer of AI. As we wonder about the nature of intelligence and consciousness, Damasio provides a wealth of tools to tackle these problems (and even makes his guesses about AI at the end of the book).
Even if you’re not into the whole AI thing, this book is a great, succinct, single point of reference for most of Damasio’s work. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who is fascinated by the human mind and human consciousness.
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