Posts Tagged ‘Soviet Union’
“There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets”*…
… and if we’re not careful, we might not be too pleased with what we get. Sam Altman says the one-person billion-dollar company is coming. Evan Ratliff tells the tale of his attempt to build a completely AI-automated venture…
… If you’ve spent any time consuming any AI news this year—and even if you’ve tried desperately not to—you may have heard that in the industry, 2025 is the “year of the agent.” This year, in other words, is the year when AI systems are evolving from passive chatbots, waiting to field our questions, to active players, out there working on our behalf.
There’s not a well agreed upon definition of AI agents, but generally you can think of them as versions of large language model chatbots that are given autonomy in the world. They are able to take in information, navigate digital space, and take action. There are elementary agents, like customer service assistants that can independently field, triage, and handle inbound calls, or sales bots that can cycle through email lists and spam the good leads. There are programming agents, the foot soldiers of vibe coding. OpenAI and other companies have launched “agentic browsers” that can buy plane tickets and proactively order groceries for you.
In the year of our agent, 2025, the AI hype flywheel has been spinning up ever more grandiose notions of what agents can be and will do. Not just as AI assistants, but as full-fledged AI employees that will work alongside us, or instead of us. “What jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents?” asked host Steven Bartlett on a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast. (The answer, according to his esteemed panel: nearly all of them). Dario Amodei of Anthropic famously warned in May that AI (and implicitly, AI agents) could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Heeding that siren call, corporate giants are embracing the AI agent future right now—like Ford’s partnership with an AI sales and service agent named “Jerry,” or Goldman Sachs “hiring” its AI software engineer, “Devin.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman, meanwhile, talks regularly about a possible billion-dollar company with just one human being involved. San Francisco is awash in startup founders with virtual employees, as nearly half of the companies in the spring class of Y Combinator are building their product around AI agents.
Hearing all this, I started to wonder: Was the AI employee age upon us already? And even, could I be the proprietor of Altman’s one-man unicorn? As it happens, I had some experience with agents, having created a bunch of AI agent voice clones of myself for the first season of my podcast, Shell Game.
I also have an entrepreneurial history, having once been the cofounder and CEO of the media and tech startup Atavist, backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. The eponymous magazine we created is still thriving today. I wasn’t born to be a startup manager, however, and the tech side kind of fizzled out. But I’m told failure is the greatest teacher. So I figured, why not try again? Except this time, I’d take the AI boosters at their word, forgo pesky human hires, and embrace the all-AI employee future…
Eminently worth reading in full: “All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives,” from @evrat.bsky.social in @wired.com.
Via Caitlin Dewey (@caitlindewey.bsky.social), whose tease/summary puts it plainly:
Ratliff, the undefeated king of tech journalism stunts, is back with another banger: For this piece and the accompanying podcast series, he created a start-up staffed entirely by so-called AI agents. The agents can communicate by email, Slack, text and phone, both with Ratliff and among themselves, and they have free range to complete tasks like writing code and searching the open internet. Despite their capabilities, however, the whole project’s a constant farce. A funny, stupid, telling farce that says quite a lot about the future of work that many technologists envision now…
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As we analyze autonomy, we might we might spare a jaundiced thought for Trofim Denisovich Lysenko; he died on this date in 1976. A Soviet biologist and agronomist, he believed the Mendelian theory of heredity to be wrong, and developed his own, allowing for “soft inheritance”– the heretability of learned behavior. (He believed that in one generation of a hybridized crop, the desired individual could be selected and mated again and continue to produce the same desired product, without worrying about separation/segregation in future breeds–he assumed that after a lifetime of developing (acquiring) the best set of traits to survive, those must be passed down to the next generation.)
In many way Lysenko’s theories recall Lamarck’s “organic evolution” and its concept of “soft evolution” (the passage of learned traits), though Lysenko denied any connection. He followed I. V. Michurin’s fanciful idea that plants could be forced to adapt to any environmental conditions, for example converting summer wheat to winter wheat by storing the seeds in ice. With Stalin’s support for two decades, he actively obstructed the course of Soviet biology, caused the imprisonment and death of many of the country’s eminent biologists who disagreed with him, and imposed conditions that contributed to the disastrous decline of Soviet agriculture and the famines that resulted.
Interestingly, some current research suggests that heritable learning– or a semblance of it– may in fact be happening by virtue of epigenetics… though nothing vaguely resembling Lysenko’s theory.
“There is a city beneath the streets”*…
Avtovo station, St. Petersburg
Anyone who knows a bit about Soviet state socialism knows about the Moscow Metro and its system of underground palaces; these awesome, opulent spaces have been a fixture of travel guides since the 1930s, and now they’re equally prevalent on Instagram accounts. Much less known is that these marble-clad portals in the centre of the capital are just the most visible elements of a gigantic Metro-building project that would gradually expand into more than a dozen different systems across several Republics — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan. After Moscow came St Petersburg, Kyiv, Tbilisi, Baku, Kharkiv, Tashkent, Yerevan, Minsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Dnipro. “Metro-Trams” with palatial underground halls were built in Krivyi Rih and Volgograd; and a miniature “Cave Metro” was built for the tourist site of New Athos, Abkhazia.
Soviet experts were also responsible for engineering Metro systems outside the USSR — in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Sofia, Pyongyang, and Calcutta (as it then was), India’s first Metro system in the capital of Communist-governed West Bengal. Soviet Metro building was an enormous project, spanning two continents. An early slogan had it that “the whole country is building the Moscow Metro”, but between the 1960s and 80s this could have been rephrased as “the Moscow Metro is being built in the whole country”. Why, then, was this particular kind of Metro building so important?…
Decorated with chandeliers, mosaics, and Lenin busts, the Soviet Union produced the most decorative (and probably the most photographed) transport system in the world. Find out why (and see more gorgeous photos) at “The heavens underground: the Soviet Union’s opulent metro stations, from Belarus to Uzbekistan.”
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As we go to ground, we might wish a Joyeux Anniversaire to Denis Diderot, contributor to and the chief editor of the Encyclopédie (“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”)– and thus towering figure in the Enlightenment; he was born on this date in 1713. Diderot was also a novelist (e.g., Jacques le fataliste et son maître [Jacques the Fatalist and his Master])… and no mean epigramist:
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it.
Spy vs. Spy…
For most of the latter half of the 20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union were leading adversaries in the nuclear arms race known as the Cold War. Seemingly no potential advantage was to be overlooked, regardless of sector or industry. This was true in technology and espionage as well, and, in the 1960s, the CIA found a marriage of the two which could have been a potential game-changer.
That innovation? A bionic spy cat named the Acoustic Kitty.
According to former CIA agent turned author Victor Marchetti, the CIA had developed a way to, literally, wire a cat so that it could be used in espionage missions. The CIA surgically implanted a power supply into the cat, as well as wires going into its brain and its ears. A microphone was layered into its ears and an antenna through its tail. The implanted device was able to determine when the cat was aroused or hungry and suppress those urges, allowing it to carry out its mission — cuddle up to some Soviets and listen to their conversations. The entire operation, from start until its end, cost the government somewhere in the ballpark of $20 million and took about five years to develop.
In testing, the CIA discovered that the Acoustic Kitty had a fatal flaw. A surveillance van drove up to the test subjects and released the cat, which again according to Marchetti, made its way across the street unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, by an oncoming taxi cab, which struck the cat, killing it immediately.
The CIA decided to drop the spy cat program soon thereafter.
From kindred spirit (public broadcasting guy who does a daily email/blog) Dan Lewis, whose Now I Know is always a treat.
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As we beef up our bionics, we might recall that one cat did make it through: on this date in 1979 Elton John became the first Western pop star to play a live concert in what was then the Soviet Union, as he performed in Leningrad, kicking off a hugely-successful Evil-Empire-wide tour.
Elton behind the (Iron) Curtain
Activists prevail: Symmetry in all things…
Back in 2007, Drew Mokris of Left-Handed Tunes, wrote an open letter to the powers-that-be at Subway, mass market purveyors of submarine sandwiches:
Now, as he reports in his blog, “the war against geometric indecency” (and the resulting uneven distribution of cheesy good taste in a Subway sandwich) is won. At least in the Antipodes:
click to enlarge2 years, 11 months, and 13 days later, Subway has changed its policy. At least for the Australia/New Zealand area.
Heralding the victory, Drew at Left-Handed Toons writes, “Now is the time for the New Procedure. You can almost picture taking every homogenous bite. It’s okay now. Everything will always forever be okay now.”
Is this a regional test or the first stage in a worldwide phase-in? We can only pray.
And so one must.
As we spread our mayonnaise evenly and all the way to the edges of our bread, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that Mongolia held its first direct presidential election.
In 1911, Mongolia declared it’s independence from China under religious leader and king Bogd Khaan. But on his death in 1924, and with the “help” of the Soviet Union, The Mongolian People’s Republic was established. Mongolia stayed within the Soviet orbit until 1992, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika and glasnost in the USSR encouraged a peaceful Democratic Revolution in Mongolia and led to the introduction of a multi-party system and market economy.
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