Cato: “Recent trends in manufacturing, remote work, independent work, globalization, and other areas argue for new policies for a New American Worker. Instead of promoting a certain kind of job, promising cradle‐to‐grave protection from disruption, or presuming that the employment and lifestyle trends of today will last beyond tomorrow, policymakers should seek to maximize Americans’ autonomy, mobility, and living standards. This book identifies what Cato Institute scholars believe to be the most important market‐oriented policies to achieve these objectives, on issues like education, labor regulation, licensing, housing, healthcare, childcare, criminal justice, and consumer necessities. Each chapter identifies the problems facing American workers and suggests pro‐market ways for federal, state, and local officials to better address these challenges.”
Arnold Kling reviews “Paper Belt on Fire” by Michael Gibson: “For Gibson, the key quality is a sort of wily resourcefulness. The great founders are the ones who always find a way. This is their highest virtue. What does it take to “find a way” in the world of tech start-ups? Gibson lists five abilities founders need. First, the ability to confront unknowns and uncertainty without being either too tentative or too overconfident. Gibson calls this “edge control.” Second, the ability to adapt as a company grows from a handful of people in a room to a giant corporation. Third, what Gibson calls “hyperfluency.” The founder must have superior knowledge of a technology/market niche but also must be able to communicate that knowledge to ordinary people unfamiliar with the niche. Fourth, founders of a company have to have the social and emotional intelligence to make hires, work with customers, raise money from investors, and gel with co-founders. Finally, the initial motivation for starting a company is often the excitement of doing something new and risky… but the sustaining motivation to keep going year after year, through all the twists and turns, has to be tied to something deeper, something richer in meaning.”
Ian Bogost: “It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon…To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.”
Paul Graham: “When you look at the lives of people who’ve done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket collector’s obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries…If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.”
WSJ: “Artificial-intelligence software programs that generate text are becoming sophisticated enough that their output often can’t be distinguished from what people write. And a growing number of companies are seeking to make use of this technology to automate the creation of information we might rely on, according to those who build the tools, academics who study the software, and investors backing companies that are expanding the types of content that can be auto-generated…AI content services are thriving. They make content creators more productive, but they also are able to produce content that no one can tell was made by a machine. This is also often true of AI-generated content of other kinds, including images, video, audio, and synthetic customer service representatives…The rise of AI-generated content is made possible by a phenomenon known variously as computational creativity, artificial creativity or generative AI.”
