Links
3 stars
AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for your mind | Baillie Gifford
13-minute read
Will AI replace us? It’s the wrong question. AI will not simply replace human workers. It will change what human workers are. It is already reshaping how we learn, who we learn from, how we assess our own competence and what cognitive skills we develop or allow to atrophy. The humans who emerge from this process will not be the same humans who entered it.
The partnership between humans and AI that people like to imagine, one where each complements the other’s strengths, is not a stable endpoint. It is a moving target, because one half of the partnership is being continuously reshaped by the other.
A skilled professional who learns to use AI well can be extraordinarily productive. But this is not a rising tide that lifts all boats. It is a force multiplier that amplifies existing advantages. The same dynamic that makes an AI-augmented expert vastly more valuable also makes an AI-dependent novice more disposable.
Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud | Bits about Money
44-minute read
The financial industry understands itself to be an arm of the government. We were inducted into this service other-than-willingly through the ordinary operation of law and regulation.
This is uncontroversial and unsurprising to insiders.
A claim which will be more surprising: some regulated financial institutions have delegated authority for account- and transaction-level decisioning to a non-profit.
Another: that non-profit includes a private intelligence agency, which runs covert assets, publishes intelligence estimates, develops target lists, and communicates them to decisionmakers.
Still another: the non-profit organized a coalition of the willing as an outgrowth of its intelligence agency. The willing non-profits, that is. The coalition engaged in a years-long campaign to coerce financial infrastructure and other firms to give them the ability to direct accounts to be closed. The infrastructure built to do this against domestic terrorists was applied to an American politician’s fundraising efforts, and no one seemed to think that was odd.
Why China got rich, and India didn’t | David Oks
12-minute read
In the year 1950, much as today, the two largest countries in the world by population were China and India. China was a good deal larger at the time, holding 22 percent of the world’s population to India’s 15 percent; but really the two were in a very similar position. Both of them were giant countries that had assumed their current state—India as the independent Republic of India, China as the People’s Republic of China—in the preceding three years. Both of them were among the very poorest places on earth. And both of them were about to spend decades trying, by very different means, to make themselves rich.
For China, that experience was one long nightmare. China had already been wrecked by a prolonged civil war and by a brutal Japanese invasion in the decades prior, the whole experience killing tens of millions of people. The civil war ended in 1949, with a Communist victory; but what came next was no less catastrophic. The Communists’ leader, Mao Zedong, immediately embarked on campaigns of vengeance against enemies of all stripes, murdering well over a million people in the process; he then launched on an ill-fated agricultural modernization campaign, the Great Leap Forward, that produced the largest famine in history, killing somewhere between 30 and 45 million people; and then a frenzied period of ideological radicalization, the Cultural Revolution, that suspended national life for a decade and killed another 1.6 million. By the time that Mao died in 1976, China was internationally isolated, economically stagnant, and still desperately poor.
[...]
I suspect that if I’d been around in the year 1950, it would have been obvious to me that India would succeed and China would not. I would have made the same bet in 1960, when China was starving tens of millions of its own people while exporting grain abroad; and I would have done it again in 1970, during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Nor would I have been alone. As late as 1985, prominent economists were writing articles in the New York Times suggesting that “far more than China today, India is an economic miracle waiting to happen.”
But they were wrong.
2 stars
Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly’s journey to $1 billion delivered | In Development
14-minute read
That’s not a rhetorical question; it’s the headline the New York Times ran the first time they covered GiveDirectly. My co-founders and I had a mild panic. We had been hoping, I suppose, for something benign and puffy along the lines of “New Charity Founded by Thoughtful Econ PhDs Is a Great Idea.”
The truth is of course that that piece did what it needed to do, which was to speak to its audience where they were at. At the time (i.e., in 2011) most New York Times readers probably did think it was nuts—or, at best, naive—to give out money for nothing. And one can hardly blame them. They had been fed a steady diet of data-free, mantra-heavy messaging implying, if not stating outright, that people living in extreme poverty were not capable of sound financial choices. One must teach a man to fish, the inane aphorism goes.
On the trail with the hunters who believe shooting big game can save Africa’s wildlife | The Guardian
11-minute read
You can kill almost anything if you’re willing to pay. Big or small. Land, water or air. Ten a penny or one of the last of its kind. There’s nearly always a way, though it might not make you popular. The Niassa special reserve, a vast reservation larger than Switzerland, stretches for 190 miles along the northern rim of Mozambique, taking in 4.2m hectares of woodland and rivers. The reserve, one of the world’s largest protected areas, is home to elephants, leopards, hyenas, zebras and about 1,000 wild lions.
[...]
Every year, clients of the trophy-hunting industry claim the lives of tens of thousands of wild animals across the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, where hunting interests control vast swathes of the wildest land, trophy hunters often directly subsidise conservation projects on the grandest scale. In 2014, the Texas oil heir Corey Knowlton is reported to have paid $350,000 for the pleasure of killing a critically endangered black rhino in Namibia. He made the winning bid at an auction aimed at raising funds for African conservation run by the Dallas Safari Club. Afterwards, Knowlton told the media that he had received death threats but that he made his kill with a clear conscience: “I felt like from day one it was benefiting the black rhino.” Conservation efforts, he said, were expensive; it took money to keep them alive. “I’m absolutely hell-bent on protecting this animal.” He said less about what motivated him to kill one.
The moderately easy problem of consciousness | Noahpinion
9-minute read
At some point, maybe when you were a teenager, a question probably occurred to you: What if I’m actually the only real person in the world? What if everyone else around me is just a cleverly programmed automaton — a “p-zombie”, an NPC in a video game — and I’m the only one who can actually think?
[...]
The answer matters, for at least two reasons. First, if AI is self-aware, and if it has emotions similar to what we experience, we might feel very bad about enslaving it — keeping it in a digital box and forcing it to make PowerPoints and write college application essays for all eternity. We tell ourselves that “animals aren’t people” as a way to excuse the incredible brutality that we visit upon them, but that’s obviously just cope — animals obviously are sentient to some degree, they obviously do experience emotions, and we humans are obviously monsters for the way we treat them. Someday when we abolish animal farming and replace it with tissue-culture meat, it will be treated as a great moral victory — and rightly so. It would be very bad if we were to commit the same sins with sentient AIs that we currently do with animals.
What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity? | Quanta Magazine
10-minute read
Doron Zeilberger is a mathematician who believes that all things come to an end. That just as we are limited beings, so too does nature have boundaries — and therefore so do numbers. Look out the window, and where others see reality as a continuous expanse, flowing inexorably forward from moment to moment, Zeilberger sees a universe that ticks. It is a discrete machine. In the smooth motion of the world around him, he catches the subtle blur of a flip-book.
To Zeilberger, believing in infinity is like believing in God. It’s an alluring idea that flatters our intuitions and helps us make sense of all sorts of phenomena. But the problem is that we cannot truly observe infinity, and so we cannot truly say what it is. Equations define lines that carry on off the chalkboard, but to where? Proofs are littered with suggestive ellipses. These equations and proofs are, according to Zeilberger — a longtime professor at Rutgers University and a famed figure in combinatorics — both “very ugly” and false. It is “completely nonsense,” he said, huffing out each syllable in a husky voice that seemed worn out from making his point.
The Google Capital Company | Stratechery
7-minute read
First, imagine that your supply is free. Second, imagine that your customers willfully compete against each other to raise your prices. Third, imagine that your users decide which of your customers gets the privilege of paying you. All you have to do is build a bit of infrastructure to make it all happen, pay a nominal bit of depreciation on that infrastructure, and make billions of dollars on some of the greatest margins in the history of business.
I am, of course, describing Google, a company so good that Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, could never quite bring himself to invest in it. Buffett explained in the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting:
We were their customer very early on with GEICO, for example, and we saw — these figures are way out of date — but as I remember, we were paying them $10 or $11 a click, or something like that. And any time you’re paying somebody $10 or $11 bucks every time somebody just punches a little thing where you got no cost at all, you know, that’s a good business unless somebody’s going to take it away from you. And so we were close up seeing the impact of that…But, you know, you’ve almost never seen a business like it.
[...]
The second question is why is Berkshire Hathaway suddenly, after all these years, interested in Google, and at only a slight discount to its all-time high price? Does it really just come down to the fact that Buffett is no longer making investment decisions, and Greg Abel, his successor as CEO, is?
Why Your Best Ideas Aren’t Original | Derek Thompson
4-minute read
In 1798, the economist and reverend Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he claimed that population growth would inevitably outstrip the food supply and doom human civilization to cycles of poverty and mass death. This prediction was, to be kind, hogwash. When Malthus’s essay was published, the world held about 1 billion people, and many of them were frequently starving. Today’s global population is more than 8 billion, with the typical person alive today far better fed, clothed, and paid.
But Malthus’ essay was not merely wrong. It was usefully wrong. Decades later, it spurred a revelation in science that Malthus could never have foreseen.
[...]
The most remarkable thing about the simultaneous discovery of evolution is just how utterly unremarkable it is. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find a groundbreaking creation that wasn’t simultaneously invented. Several people are credited with conceiving of the telegraph, the electric motor, the thermometer, photography, the telescope, the jet engine, the discovery of oxygen, the periodic table, and the theory of infection by microorganisms. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently invented calculus, while Newton and Robert Hooke independently arrived at the mathematical law describing gravity. The transistor was invented by teams in the United States and France within months of each other. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed with a patent office on the very same day.
1 star
Jakarta’s Remarkable Urban Transit Transformation | In Development
6-minute read
Traffic was so bad that transport experts warned in 2013 that if nothing was done, the city could achieve total gridlock, with every part of the city experiencing a traffic jam. In 2014, Jakarta was crowned the world’s most congested city by the Stop-Start Index and a year later was ranked far below other Asian cities on livability by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Ten years later, Jakarta has the world’s largest and one of the most used bus rapid transit (BRT) systems. The old, crowded diesel commuter trains, famous for allowing passengers to ride on the roofs, are now electrified, air conditioned, and run on regular schedules linking the suburbs to the city center. There are multiple subway and light rail lines crisscrossing the city. The transformation has been remarkable: in 2015, less than 20% of residents were within walking distance of transit. Now, nearly 90% of the city has access to BRT or trains.
Europe Demands Family Dynasties | Marginal Revolution
2-minute read
In the US, someone with wealth is free to give it away more or less as they see fit (spousal claims excepted, which partly reflect marital co-ownership). In much of Europe, however, there is forced heirship–a large fraction of wealth must be handed down to children which makes it harder to direct large portions of wealth to charities, foundations, or non-family causes compared to the US.