Between getting ridiculously excited about the goings-on OpenAI, I didn't get a lot of writing done this week. There are definitely times when too much is going on in the tech world, and my old habits die hard: I have to keep up with it all.
I wrote a post on Substack with my take on it, from the perspective of the longer-term impact on creative professionals. And, given how fast things were moving, I ended up rewriting it three times. That was a good reminder not to cover breaking news in that newsletter!
In case you're interested, the focus of that newsletter is the three-to-five year perspective on how technology will impact on what we occasionally call “the creative industries”. That includes magazine publishing, of course, but also writing and creativity more broadly. Hopefully, it should be interesting.
On Sunday, we went out with the wonderful and super-clever Deb Chachra, who has just published her book How infrastructure works (and there's a great review of it here if you are interested). We tempted Deb out of London on a trip to Dungeness, which has both Derek Jarman's cottage and Dungeness A and B nuclear reactors. What's not to like about art and infrastructure?
And more art on Sunday night, as we went down to Folkestone for a talk by the brilliant and wise Jeremy Deller. If you don't know Deller's work, honestly, where have you been for the last 20 years? This is the third time we have done something Deller-related this year, having seen him before in London and also seen Acid Brass. 2023: Year of the Deller.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Commiserations to my old comrades in SEO, who are dealing with some pretty turbulent times. I promise that I didn't sabotage Google.
- Bill Gates wrote a long post about the way AI is going to change the way you use computers. Gates is right – large language models are just the precursor to what might look from some angles like the end of application software altogether.
- Bloomberg looked at the way Elon Musk has been radicalised by social media, adopting a world-view that's completely in the thrall of what we would have called the alt-right not that long ago.
Things I have been writing
There were three… no, actually four drafts of my post about what was going on at OpenAI and why you should care. I am never doing breaking essays on news again.
To give myself a break from all things Orford, I picked up a short story that I had left to one side, about a very strange doctor. Might finish that this week.
