#2: Search continues for someone with an opinion on AI

I’m back with a new Attention piece! Here it is:

Search continues for someone with an opinion on AI

The rationale

Wow, people sure like talking about AI. Don’t get me wrong: AI is part of my day job so I’m not exactly a stranger to having opinions on the technology (as seen on this blog, in fact).

But if you’re anything like me, sometimes the AI opining starts to feel a little overwhelming. Tech commentators, CEOs, politicians, activists, celebrities, doom-mongerers, accelerationists. Your mum and dad. Your brother and sister. Your 3-year old toddler. Your toddler’s 3-year old friend who just raised $120m from a16z for their AI customer service startup. The dozens of newly minted and acronymed AI centres and institutes.

And LinkedIn influencers. There is nothing wrong with making a living on LinkedIn talking about AI. But there are so many people doing it, and they can’t all be right, and maybe it would be nice if some of them could just follow Bo Burnham’s advice occasionally.

So the piece is my gentle riposte to the AI-hot-take-industrial complex.

The button

Another thing I did last week: spend countless hours turning the Attention masthead into a nice interactive button (inspired by this tutorial):

I hope you agree with me that this button is a total game changer. Previously, Attention was an upstart tech publication. Now, Attention is an upstart tech publication with a reasonably nice button. LET’S GOOOOOO!

The best part is, the story of the button is not over. I have plans to make the button animate and shrink when you scroll, a feature which will take an absurd amount of time to build, and which Attention’s 0 readers have been clamoring for since day one.

Relatedly, I hope to soon embark on an entire button-related project called The Best Subscribe Button In The Universe, where I deploy my carefully honed and very obsessive button-crafting skills in the service of getting people to sign up to this newsletter, throwing every design trick in the book at another reasonably nice button and promoting it as the best button that has ever existed.

The blockers

I’m getting back into my stride with writing, and even more importantly with posting what I write in various corners of the web — a tortuous but necessary step to find more readers.

It’s always hard to get momentum going once it’s gone. You go back to thinking that what you write is dumb, and to editing for perfection. You freeze before posting links to random subreddits, Slack channels, group chats. The good thing is that last year, I got into a good groove of this — so I know it’s doable, and sense that I’m heading back in that direction.

In that spirit, I’m going to abruptly end this edition of Directing Attention without bothering to finish the paragraph properly, to show that I can handle things not being perfec