27. The Weekly - Emergent Incentives
On artificial intelligence, close friends and shaking it up.
Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter, where I share inspiration and bite-sized musings on creative business each week. Enjoy!
Quick thoughts
Musings on business, creativity, psychology and more.
Thoughts on AI
After Vogue Codes last week, I’ve been thinking about the how AI will affect the ecosystem. Here are some musings and predictions on where I see this field heading and the social and psychology influences.
I’m by no means an expert so I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic!
IRL vs Online
The gap between reality and the online world will widen, as AI bots comment and reply to other AI bots, real people will slowly extract themselves from the online conversation. This is already occurring as online conversations increasingly become more and more private, although this seems to also be motivated by privacy and a waning desire to broadcast every thought.
Meta’s purchase of Whatsapp in 2014 was the early identification of this trend from public to private. Recently Jonathan Anderson’s debut collection for Dior was teased only to the brand’s close friends stories on instagram. Although the latter is more gimmick than trend, it does signify that even though the conversation is still online, it’s increasing private.
LinkedIn and Pinterest have both been criticised for the proliferation of “AI-generated slop” that is increasingly filling up the feeds which begs the question, if AI is so good, why can’t it post anything interesting?
Show me the incentives
Much like how social media is free because we are the product, AI is running the same model. The way you talk and perform tasks is your intellectual property and you should be compensated for feeding your IP back into a generative model.
Don’t get me wrong, I am pro AI but I’d like to see the ability to own and license any AI that is built from your IP (licensed to you, not your employer).
As the famous quote Charlie Munger goes “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” the incentive for AI is currently billions of dollars in funding for a few big companies. Building for an eventual IPO means the investor/shareholder is actually the customer, not the user.
With a model that spreads the incentives, you can develop more equitable and sustainable tech that benefits the users and the technology. (Ps - if anyone knows of a company already doing this, please link me!)
Personalised Medicine
To me one of the most exciting fields for AI is medicine. Human bodies are unique so the opportunity for AI to rapid test interventions that are specific to you is very interesting.
For example, ask all your female friends how they experience their period and you won’t get two answers that are the same. Its a paradigm shift from statistical significance across a huge population to demonstrate effectiveness, to rapid personalised interventions that are measured on an individual’s outcome.
This is already underway - The Zero Childhood Cancer project can biopsy rare cancerous tumours and assess against a range of medicines to establish a treatment approach in hours, doubling the survival rate for the terminally ill children in these trials. Digital twins are in development to provide a risk free testing ground before trying out new medicines.
Anything can be sustainable if you make it sustainably
That is, thats the idea.
Inspiration
Things that have inspired me this week.
Dan Levy and Jonathan Anderson on Balancing Creativity and Commerce
While we all agree it would be nice to have a million dollars fall from the sky into our laps, there is so much to learn from building something from scratch, where every dollar counts. As Dan Levy elaborates, building Schitt’s Creek from nothing built their confidence and proved to the world that the way they worked, works.
It’s also a timely reminder to never become formulaic. When your process is there for safety (i.e test screenings, focus groups etc) not creativity, it’s time to shake things up.
“The minute a brand becomes formulaic, the clock starts ticking”
Complexity isn’t added — it's emergent.
Originally created by Умная механика
A cool animation of something that is hard to explain. Complex systems organise themselves according to rules -they may seem chaotic to an observer but for the individual, everything is where it’s meant to be.
Chaos to Clarity in 4 Weeks
If you’re at a point in your business where:
You’re not sure what’s next
Theres a million things you want to do but you’re not sure where to start
You’re drowning in the day-to-day with no time for big picture thinking
You’re simply craving some fresh eyes on your business
My four week Strategy Support program might be just what you need. Four 1hr one-on-one sessions where we work through your goals, whats working & what’s not, and come up with a clear, actionable strategy to get you where you want to be going.
If that sounds like you, get in touch.
That’s it for this week! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts - you can DM me or leave a comment.
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Vogue Codes 2025
The doom and gloom of technology reporting can feel overwhelming, as though the state of progress is dictated by a few tech bros and we are powerless to stop it.
24. The Weekly - Illustrated Value
Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter, where I share inspiration and bite-sized musings on creative business each week.