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Quick and Dirty No. 1

Quick and Dirty is a (semi-)weekly dump of interesting links that recently caught my attention and may or may not be related to design and business.

1. AlphaGo — The Movie, on Youtube

I knew that the game Go was considered to be one of the biggest challenges for artificial intelligence but I didn’t know why until I watched this documentary. Go is comparably more complex than chess. There are thousands of possible moves at every stage of the game. However, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the best Go players in the world, in a series of matches in 2016. The documentary follows the events and gives insights into how AI works. What’s remarkable about the epic encounter between man and machine is that AlphaGo starts to feel like a living counterpart because of how its creators talk about AlphaGo’s decisions during the games. But fear not! Even DeepMind, the company behind AlphaGo, says that their AI is limited in its abilities (at least in 2016). So even if it might seem scary that AI can win in Go, its complete world domination will have to wait.

2. The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions, by Stratechery

In this article Ben Thompson talks in-depth about Carlota Perez’s book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital from 2002 and her thesis that we’re in the middle of a fifth technological revolution. Ben Thompson looks back and tries to determine what stage of the technological life cycle humanity is currently in.

3. The Tweet of the Week

Date
October 20, 2021
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Quick and Dirty No. 2 Quick and Dirty is a (semi-)weekly dump of interesting links that recently caught my attention and may or may not be related to design and
Previously
Why Would You Need Design? I recently had a discussion with my father during a hike along the white chalk cliffs in the national park on Rügen, Germany. He told me bemused