⚡️When will the AI bubble burst?
PLUS: New prosthetic limbs can help patients feel again
Clayton Hester
July 17, 2023
The Precap
Happy Monday, creatives!
Hope you’re having a great day.
But if you’re not up to full-speed yet, we’ve got the Spark for you.
Today, we’re examining the immortal question: is AI a bubble?
And, the recipe genre, and its future.
Meanwhile, new prosthetic limbs offer a chance for amputees to feel again.
And a look back at Carl Linnaeus — the man who classified the world’s critters.
—Clayton
Trends & Changes
🤖AI: bubble or bellwether?
That’s the question that is hanging on the 2023 upswell in conversation around the technology.
From Silicon Valley over to Washington D.C., AI has crossed the country and the world.
The end result?
An economy ripe for (and rife with) disruption.
📃The CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, is calling it the “biggest bubble of all time.”
Obviously, this means something different from the typical naysaying you may get about the AI craze, seeing it come from a tech insider.
He’s calling it the “dot AI" bubble and believes it hasn't even started yet.
Stability AI is the company that rolled out Stable Diffusion in August 2022.
So what are his reasons?
💭Part of the issue has been certain sectors that aren’t ready for AI, such as banking.
Not to mention the time that Google’s Bard AI cost it $100 billion when it gave inaccurate information.
But he did say that AI is probably going to become a $1 trillion industry.
That, "because it's more important than 5G as infrastructure for knowledge."
👩🍳Food For Thought
“Much writing about food is lovely and comforting,” Rebecca May Johnson writes, “but not all of it must be, and the feeling that it should is a symptom of the culture that underestimates the recipe.”
Johnson sees recipe writing as a form of knowledge often denied recognition and aims to restore cooking as a valuable form of expression, treating recipes as texts worthy of serious attention and draws parallels between recipe writing and translation.
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Breakthroughs Daily
For people who have lost limbs, having a prosthetic arm is only part of the equation.
What’s missing?
The simple sense that covers our entire body: feeling.
Thanks to new advancements in neuroscience and technology, patients may be getting that sense back.
History of Ideas
A new book is exploring the life of "The Man Who Organized Nature.”
He is the man behind the “Homo sapiens”-induced giggle of every middle school student.
Carl von Linné, also known as Linnaeus, was a Swedish naturalist who gave us the system of classifying living organisms with two-part Latin names.
The new book is "The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus" by Gunnar Broberg, translated by Anna Paterson.
Here’s a great piece of trivia:
Convinced that the banana tree was the biblical Tree of Knowledge and that Adam and Eve had used banana leaves, not fig leaves, to hide their nakedness, Linnaeus named it the Musa paradisiaca (paradise fruit) and imported it to Uppsala, with the expected results.
His seminal work was “Systema Naturae," which expanded over time.
Oh, and did you know that Linnaeus covered mythical critters too?
Spotlight
As the YouTube title suggests, “In Search of Time” is an exploration of time and identity, with shifting, dream-like figures that lack the concreteness of reality and gift each scene with the transcience of memory.
