The Economist writes that India’s “rocketing Internet growth has stalled”. It writes: “Of the country’s roughly 1bn mobile-phone users, a third still use old-fashioned dumbphones, mainly for voice calls. And recent data suggest that they are not about to upgrade them. All but a tiny proportion of Indian internet users get online using their phones. Yet the number of wireless broadband connections is flat. In October last year, the latest month for which figures are available, the telecoms regulator counted 790m wireless broadband connections, barely exceeding the previous peak of 789m, which was recorded in August 2021. (The number of subscribers is lower than this, because many people have more than one connection.) Smartphone sales are down. After growing for a decade, sales peaked at 161m units in 2021, according to idc, a market researcher, which reckons that last year the number fell to 148m. Meanwhile the average smartphone price has surged, from $163 before the pandemic to $220 in 2022.”
Evan Armstrong: “Self-improvement is great and productivity is wonderful, but something about this vein of thought feels off. When I try to follow this advice, I may temporarily get more stuff done, but it comes at the expense of my soul. I feel like an obsessive-compulsive lumberjack, hyper-focused on marginal improvements in my sawing technique—until one day, as I finish my labors, I realize I accidentally clear-cut the forest for the trees. The little things we do to make ourselves better may end up draining us dry. Instead, I would argue for the unoptimized life…We get so caught up in the daily grind, in the pursuit of the next step of the ladder, that we miss the point of being. I think the default state of life is that we will get filled up with small things. Whether small productivity improvements or minor inconveniences, it doesn’t matter. Either take away our chance to focus on something more.”
Ian Leslie on being a human in the Age of AI: “It’s going to get less and less valuable and more and more perilous to be generic in any way–to be a generic writer, or to be a generic person, a generic thinker. Because, the machines are very good at analyzing–effectively, the kind of average, the generic model of this form of thought, this form of expression, whatever. There will be a much higher premium on cultivating your own distinctive, inimitable voice in whatever form that takes. Whether that could be literally your voice if you’re a singer. If you’re a writer, of course, it’s very important. I see huge amounts of generic writing out there by competent writers. But, good luck being a generic writer in 5, 10, 20 years. It’s going to get much harder. You need to kind of dig deeper and really work out what it is about you: whether it’s what you know about that nobody else knows about or what you care about or how you express yourself, whatever it is. Your voice is now really the most valuable thing about you.”
Atanu Dey: “Most of us have the basic sense to realize that there are limits to growth. If there are four people sharing a pizza pie, then each gets a fourth of the pie; if you have forty people sharing that same pie, then each gets 1/40th of the pie. If the earth can only support two billion people in reasonable comfort given the resources at hand, increasing the population to eight billion will be the road to ruin. Therefore, Ehrlich makes sense to most people — except to madmen, and to trained economists. Trained economists realize that there are no limits to resources because resources are not limited in any meaningful way. The problems humans face — including scarcity of resources — are solved by humans. Indeed, the resources expand as a consequence of real resource constraints felt in the short term. It’s those short-term problems that lead to long-term growth. This is counter-intuitive. This doesn’t come naturally to us. One has to be trained in economics to get that point. Ehrlich, unfortunately, has proven himself to be incapable of learning economics. The tragedy is that he will continue to mislead too many people into buying his silly doom and gloom.”
FT: “Google Search was once one of the wonders of the online world. Its clean, organised pages of results filtered the otherwise unmanageable slog of information on the internet. That was until it became cluttered with adverts. Now the world’s biggest search engine is less encyclopedia, more Yellow Pages. Look up a search term that can also be a product — asthma inhalers, for example — and you will need to scroll past up to four large adverts before reaching non-sponsored results. Search for clothing and the entire first page will be companies hoping to make a sale. Even non-ad results can look like wrong answers, with links full of buzzwords so Google gives them a higher ranking.”
FT: “how can leaders find the right balance between exerting enough authority to help people feel well led, while allowing enough autonomy to obtain the best from people? Understanding the basic dynamics between those in authority and their employees is a start…One important aspect of leadership is managing people’s anxieties — too much control and people feel infantilised, but if you do not project enough authority, they become anxious.”
Ben Thompson: “The biggest impact of all though [of AI], though, is probably off our radar completely. Just before the break Nat Friedman told me in a Stratechery Interview about Riffusion, which uses Stable Diffusion to generate music from text via visual sonograms, which makes me wonder what else is possible when images are truly a commodity. Right now text is the universal interface, because text has been the foundation of information transfer since the invention of writing; humans, though, are visual creatures, and the availability of AI for both the creation and interpretation of images could fundamentally transform what it means to convey information in ways that are impossible to predict. For now, our predictions must be much more time-constrained, and modest. This may be the beginning of the AI epoch, but even in tech, epochs take a decade or longer to transform everything around them.”
