Wisereads Vol. 131 — Superconvergence by Jamie Metzl, Ali Abdaal on how to learn AI in 19 minutes, and more
Last week, we shared a preview of Marc Randolph's That Will Never Work. This week, we’re sharing a preview of Superconvergence, Jamie Metzl's exploration of genetics and biotech in the era of AI.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
Margaret-Anne Storey, a professor of computer science and an ICSE Technical Debt Conference keynote speaker, explains why understanding must stay ahead of speed. "Cognitive debt tends not to announce itself through failing builds or subtle bugs after deployment, but rather shows up through a silent loss of shared theory."
Why I’m not worried about AI job loss
AI and political economy writer David Oks argues that job-loss panic misses the reality of our complex, human-centric world: "The world is run by humans, and because it’s run by humans—entities that are smelly, oily, irritable, stubborn, competitive, easily frightened, and above all else inefficient—it is a world of bottlenecks. And as long as we have human bottlenecks, we'll need humans to deal with them."
Taste for Makers
Programmer and YC cofounder Paul Graham recently re-shared one of his most popular essays, predicting that cultivating good taste is more important now than ever. "If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. ... Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?"
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
You’re Not Behind (Yet): How to Learn AI in 19 Minutes
Doctor-turned-entrepreneur and productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal maps a three-month path to AI fluency for anyone who's feeling like they might have missed the boat. "Increasingly, business owners are genuinely making decisions about who to hire, who to fire, and who to promote based on their level of AI fluency."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
Tool Shaped Objects
Will Manidis, ScienceIO cofounder and healthcare AI builder, explores why some tools can feel productive while not actually creating tangible value. "You can hold it. You can use it. It fits in the hand the way a tool should. It produces the feeling of work—the friction, the labor, the sense of forward motion—but it doesn't produce work. The object is not broken, it is performing its function. It's function is to feel like a tool."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
The Future Of Software Engineering
Thoughtworks convened senior engineers to map how AI agents are reshaping software work, from a new supervisory middle loop to organizational bottlenecks and testing-first practices. "The retreat surfaced a consistent pattern: the practices, tools and organizational structures built for human-only software development are breaking in predictable ways under the weight of AI-assisted work. The replacements are forming, but they are not yet mature."
Hand-picked book of the week
Superconvergence
Jamie Metzl, WHO genome-editing advisor and author of Hacking Darwin, charts how accelerating advances in genetics, biotech, and AI are reshaping everything from health to the planet as a whole. Blending big-picture history with near-future scenarios, Superconvergence shows how exponential innovation, fragile governance, and enduring human values intersect, and what it will actually take to steer those powers with wisdom, equity, and foresight.
"After nearly four billion years of life on Earth, our one species, among the billions which have ever lived, suddenly has the increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life. We are today in the earliest stages of a journey in which we will have the growing capacity, over the coming years, decades, centuries, and millennia, to redirect evolution and recast life in all its dimensions, with profound implications for the future of life on Earth and, very likely, beyond."
If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full ebook wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada for $3.99 through the end of February.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Knowledge Lust
Sam Rinko writes Knowledge Lust on practical self-education, sharing tales of great autodidacts and lessons for effective self-study. From How to make yourself crave hard books (not just want to want to read them): "You don’t have to be a professional teacher or a writer to teach and write. You don’t have to make a living from your intellectual work to justify integrating occasional creative intellectual projects into your life. A project that forces you to read, think, and create is an enriching and fulfilling challenge that everyone should take part in."