Links for Sunday
Four questions for a Sunday: watching metrics, anthropomorphism in chatbots, whether AI improves our skills, and art as a limit for digital platforms.
Four readings for a Sunday. I leave them phrased as questions, because that is how I came across them, and because a question usually ages better than a conclusion.
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Does frequently monitoring a metric reduce the perception of progress? — Measurement is not a neutral act: it changes the relationship between the person measuring and the thing measured. If checking cadence alters the sense of progress, then the frequency of our dashboards is a question of organisational design, not a configuration detail.
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Is anthropomorphism an indicator of a chatbot's success? — An uncomfortable question, because it separates two things the industry tends to conflate: a system being convincing and a system being useful.
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Can AI assistance improve our skills? — The interesting case is not immediate productivity but the trace it leaves behind. A tool can solve today's task and leave us worse equipped for tomorrow's, or exactly the opposite.
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Is art a limit for digital platforms? — Where platform logic runs out. Some materials resist classification, recommendation and consumption metrics, and it is worth knowing which ones.