Shane Parish: “The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking. One way to force yourself to slow down and think is to write. Good writing requires good thinking. Clear writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide, making a lack of understanding visible.”
Wired: “Bots are polluting the internet. Fake online users make up as much as 40 percent of all web traffic, according to some estimates. Researchers specializing in advertising fraud describe a Kafkaesque system where businesses pay millions to advertise to bots and research their “opinions.” Yet the digital advertising industry has grown so accustomed to working with inflated numbers that few are willing to unmask the fake clicks powering large swathes of the online economy…Botmasters have created a Kafkaesque system where companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots. And everyone is fine with this.”
Donald Boudreaux: “In markets, the allocation of resources is guided by prices confronted by, profits earned by, and losses suffered by individuals spending their own money. And because what is ‘destroyed’ by market-driven creative destruction isn’t anything physical or biological – because what is destroyed isn’t human lives – because this ‘destruction’ is merely of economic value and is the result only of peaceful and productive choices rather than of war or famine or disease – the process of creative destruction is a blessing for humanity. To the extent that it is allowed to operate, the process of creative destruction brings us ever-greater prosperity.”
Michael Spence: “The ongoing digital movement has enormous potential to increase productivity with inclusive growth — in e-commerce, research in China, etc., shows the average distance between buyers and sellers is 1,000 kilometres now while in the offline world, this is five kilometres. That’s a dramatic expansion in the accessible market, giving everyone the outreach only big multinationals once had. Then there is artificial intelligence (AI) — think of the breakthroughs in image recognition algorithms, which can now even detect cancers from pictures or diagnose diabetic retinopathy. These could dramatically extend medical diagnostics and healthcare services. In the life sciences and biomedical fields, the costs of very powerful tools are reducing.”
