WSJ: “Martin Cooper, the man who made the first call on a handheld device, reflects on how the technology has changed the world—and the advances still to come….His vision for the future beyond 2023 features a central role for artificial intelligence: “A phone is now an extension of you. . . . Today, if you want to customize a phone for you, all I can do is a simple thing like sort through four million apps and decide what’s the right one for you. In the future, you will have an artificial intelligence—that’s you, your personal, own artificial intelligence—and it will examine your behavior, and it will decide what app you need, and it will either create that app or go find it for you.” He describes today’s smartphone as “suboptimal”: “It’s a flat piece of glass, and you put it up to your curved head, hold it in an uncomfortable position—that’s not what a future phone should be. The phone is going to end up being distributed on your body.” What does that mean? “Ultimately it’s going to be embedded under your skin,” he says. “You don’t have to charge it because your body is the charger.””
Technology Review on ChatGPT: “To get the inside story behind the chatbot—how it was made, how OpenAI has been updating it since release, and how its makers feel about its success—I talked to four people who helped build what has become one of the most popular internet apps ever. In addition to Agarwal and Fedus, I spoke to John Schulman, a cofounder of OpenAI, and Jan Leike, the leader of OpenAI’s alignment team, which works on the problem of making AI do what its users want it to do (and nothing more). What I came away with was the sense that OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview, but has grabbed the opportunity to push this technology forward, watching how millions of people are using it and trying to fix the worst problems as they come up.”
WaPo: ““Demographically, we have two Indias,” said Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s chief economic adviser between 2014 and 2018. “The India of the south already resembles East Asia. It’s actually in the early stages of aging. But the Hindi heartland is still very much booming.”…The north-south gap in birthrates and overall development is stirring frequent debates about how to apportion federal spending and how to allocate seats in Parliament. It’s also sparked efforts by government leaders and development experts to provide enough jobs to the poor, northern states — and lift up women…who are left behind even as India’s surging economy looks destined to overtake Germany’s later this decade.”
Sophy Roberts writes about a week’s cruise down the Brahmaputra: “Over the past hundred years or so, the river’s width has nearly doubled. Climate change has accelerated the rate of glacial melt in the Brahmaputra’s Himalayan headwaters. The patterns of the monsoon are shifting, pushing crop cycles out of step. Erosion and encroachment have reduced the river’s natural barriers; deforestation has left fewer tree roots gripping the shorelines’ sandy ground. Despite the occasional run of government-implemented “porcupines” (bamboo or concrete structures which slow the current and trap sediment), the flood defences aren’t enough. Yet somehow human settlement thrives on this edge-land. Like the Nile and Euphrates, the Brahmaputra’s flow has shaped sophisticated riverine civilisations — layers of cultural history that give my journey a contour when I join a week-long trip on an elegant 18-cabin river boat.”
