Wisereads Vol. 106 — The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, Mustafa Suleyman on building AI for people, and more

Last week, we shared a preview of Austin Kleon's original illustrated hit, Steal Like an Artist. This week, we're sharing an excerpt from Brian Potter’s upcoming debut, The Origins of Efficiency, a historically rich exploration of innovation and progress.

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After stepping back from the spotlight to raise his kids, Trilogy founder Joe Liemandt has returned as principal of an AI-powered school in Austin, Texas. In the classroom, his interviewer observed: "I notice that all the fourth graders have a column that just says 'Wharton MBA simulation.' 'Come on,' I said to Liemandt. 'Nope, it’s true,' he smiled. 'We required them all to pass the Wharton MBA Teamwork and Leadership Simulation. They all did it. Keep in mind our kindergartners have to climb a 40-foot rock wall and pass a "Receive critical feedback without crying" workshop. By fourth grade they’re pretty tough.'"

Seemingly Conscious AI, or SCAI, is what Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman fears most. He warns that poorly designed interfaces could exploit our instinct to attribute consciousness: "I will never know what it’s like to be you; you will never be quite sure that I am conscious. All you can do is infer it. But the point is that, nonetheless, it comes naturally to us to attribute consciousness to other humans. This inference is effortless."

Flow researcher Rian Doris recalls feeling trapped in an endless grind until he uncovered the five factors of intrinsic motivation: curiosity, purpose, mastery, autotelicity, and autonomy. "Intrinsic fuel works better than extrinsic fuel and it compounds; it makes hard work easy, leading to an upward spiral of skill development and access to flow state, that optimal state of consciousness where we lose ourselves in deep immersion within our work."

Andrej Karpathy shares an update on how AI now supports his coding workflow: "The bread & butter (~75%?) of my LLM assistance continues to be just (Cursor) tab complete," while his "Final layer of defense is GPT5 Pro, which I go to for the hardest things... [it] actually finds a really subtle bug. It is very strong. It can dig up all kinds of esoteric docs and papers."

Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab reveal a startling statistic in their latest paper: most large-scale AI initiatives are failing. "Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return... Just 5% of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority remain stuck with no measurable P&L impact."

The stories we tell about innovation often tie up history in neat little bows. In The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter digs deeper, revealing that beyond invention lies process efficiency, the overlooked driver of progress that transforms lives.

Take penicillin: you’ve likely heard the story of Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery. And yet, it took another decade before scientists could isolate enough of the antibiotic to save a single life.

"Prior to the emergence of antibiotics, bacterial illnesses were responsible for approximately 20 percent of all deaths in the US. Between 1936 and 1952, deaths from bacterial illnesses in the US dropped by nearly 70 percent. By some estimates, antibiotics have extended average human lifespan by 23 years. The initial discovery of penicillin was, of course, necessary to these later achievements. But it was only by making antibiotics cheap and widely available—that is, by producing them efficiently—that this miracle medicine was able to save millions of lives."

As longtime fans of Brian's work, we’re thrilled he's sharing a preview of his forthcoming Stripe Press book with Wisereads readers. If it sparks your curiosity as it did ours, you can preorder The Origins of Efficiency before its September 23rd release here.

Inspired by Henrik Karlsson to treat blogging as a query to find fascinating people, Maja began writing thoughtful explorations of the human experience on her Substack, Velvet Noise. From why some conversations rearrange your brain: "We move through the world assuming we’ve mapped the people closest to us. We know their coffee orders, their dating history, the last podcast they recommended. But these are surface echoes, tidy exports of interior life. And interior life is rarely tidy."