Like cooperating with a ghost
Five fragments for the week of March 4, 2024
Welcome to March. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading concept through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
This week, we’re digging through my archive of thousands of book highlights. Thanks to Readwise for being the best way to lovingly sift through them all.
Acknowledging—and exploiting—the unlimited plasticity of Virtual Reality might have been the most “honest” thing to do…but Thomas needed a world with a permanent structure, not a dream city which reconfigured itself to his every whim.
– Greg Egan, Permutation City, a science-fiction novel published in 1994. Thanks to Antonio for suggesting it when I mentioned last year that I was reading The Age of Em.
Operating an automated system can be like cooperating with a ghost.
– David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy, published in 2015.
How do you make a charismatic thing—not just a thing that works, but a thing that has elegant presence or pleasure in its handling, some kind of draw, a thing that pulls you in or makes you think while also being handy, modest, even garden-variety in its value? This combination is what makes design so interesting to so many people.
– Sara Hendren, What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World, published in 2020. (Related: Sara’s newsletter.)
What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.
– Steve Jobs at the International Design Conference in 1983, quoted in Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Paging back through my highlights, this one stood out to me as a possible explanation for the Vision Pro’s look and feel: it’s full-circle.
You’ll find every spell of power has at least one deliberate mistake or mystery in it to prevent accidents.
– Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle. One of my favorite authors growing up. Thinking about AI as spells of power…
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com