NYTimes: “It’s been a banner year, in particular, for generative A.I. apps that turn text prompts into images — which, unlike NFTs or virtual reality metaverses, actually have the numbers to justify the hype they’ve received. DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day, according to the company. Midjourney, another popular A.I. image generator released this year, has more than three million users in its official Discord server…But no generative A.I. project has created as much buzz — or as much controversy — as Stable Diffusion.” More: “Only a few months old, apps like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are changing how filmmakers, interior designers and other creative professionals do their jobs.”
McKinsey: “We start the next era—if indeed one is about to unfold—from a fundamentally different point from which we started the prior one. The world at the turn of the 1990s had a much more obvious gap between the developed and the developing worlds: huge populations poor in energy and resources, more people living in rural areas outside of the orbit of global markets and capital, more people uneducated, and disconnected from each other and from the world’s information. In the previous era, the world converged much more into a globalized economy, with rapid catch-up growth for billions of people where we managed peacefully to keep the gains. Without question today’s world is better, but with this growth there is also much more disruption to established constituencies, more pangs of imbalance, and more powerful new players asserting their place at the global table.”
The Titanium Economy authors: “What if a group of companies could consistently outperform the market? What if they could create millions of high-quality American jobs and lead technological innovation while building a more sustainable future? These companies already exist. They are what we call the Titanium Economy: a cohort of industrial technology companies that are redefining the future of US manufacturing. Of the more than 4,000 firms that make up the Titanium Economy, the majority have seen an 11 to 15 percent return on invested capital over the past decade. Most are privately owned, small- to mid-cap companies that don’t have consumer-facing brands. And for many Titanium companies, their performance has rivaled that of Silicon Valley’s tech darlings over the past decade. Like their namesake metal, these companies are resilient and essential to many of the products that we use every day. Winners in the Titanium Economy offer a simple playbook that America’s manufacturers—and many others—can learn from: digitalize your operations, respond to external shifts, execute programmatic M&A, upskill your workforce, and prioritize sustainability.” WSJ review: “Supply-chain issues are about more than keeping shelves stocked. ‘The American spirit,’ the authors remind us, ‘is about controlling one’s destiny.’”
Tyler Cowen: “In the classical liberal view, elites usually fall short of what we would like. They end up captured by some mix of special interest groups and poorly informed voters. There is thus a certain disillusionment with democratic government, while recognizing it is the best of available alternatives and far superior to autocracy for basic civil liberties. That said, classical liberals do not consider the elites to be totally hopeless. After all, someone has to steer the ship and to this day we do indeed have a ship to steer. Most elites are intelligent and also they are as well-meaning as the rest of us, even if the bureaucratic nature of politics hinders their performance. We can entrust them with supplying basic public goods, and indeed we have little choice…The New Right thinkers are far more skeptical of elites. They are more likely to see elites as evil and pernicious, and sometimes they (implicitly) see these evil elites as competent enough to actually wreck society. The classical liberals see checks and balances as strong enough to limit the worst outcomes, whereas the New Right sees ideological conformity and indeed collusion within the Establishment. Checks and balances are a paper tiger…The policy emphasis then becomes learning how to use the government to constrain the Left and its cultural agenda, rather than ensuring basic liberties for everyone. The New Right view is that this obsession with basic liberties leads, in reality, to the hegemony of a statist Left, and a Left that will use its power centers of government, media and academia to crush and cancel the New Right.”
