WSJ: “[Po-Shen Loh] says the key to survival is knowing how to solve problems—and knowing which problems to solve. He urges math nerds to focus on creativity, emotion and the stuff that distinguishes man from machine and won’t go obsolete. As artificial intelligence gets smarter, the premium on ingenuity will become greater. This is what he wants to drill into their impressionable young minds: Being human will only be more important as AI becomes more powerful.”
Ramesh Mangaleswaran & Rahul Ahluwalia: “Mobile phone exports from India went from about $5 billion in 2021-22 to around $10 billion last year. This growth was driven primarily by Apple, which accounted for half the mobile phone exports from India in 2022-23. Electronics exports overall rose to about $20 billion from $13 billion. As good as this news is, benchmarking against other countries shows how much further we can go. In 2022, Vietnam, a country about as big as Madhya Pradesh, exported $114 billion in electronics. China exported close to $900 billion. What can take our green shoots in electronics exports and turn them into a flourishing eco-system? The answer is deceptively simple but critically important and highly time sensitive: prioritize building one large export cluster around one big anchor investor… India can be a splendid alternative if we set ourselves the target of reaching $100 billion in exports from just one large electronics cluster, and line up all the ducks needed to deliver on it.”
strategy+business: “In Unbreakable: Building and Leading Resilient Teams, Bradley Kirkman and Adam Stoverink, business professors at North Carolina State and the University of Arkansas, respectively, tackle the problem of how to gird your team against the setbacks that disrupt operations—or worse. Teams have great potential advantages in the face of setbacks. The talent, energy, and resources of a group will always exceed those of an individual, and group members can support one another in a crisis. But the point of a team is to accomplish ends sufficiently challenging and complex that a whole bunch of people must work together. That means coordination, communication, and, potentially, friction. Teams also need some things that tend to be in tension with one another. They need leadership, for example, yet they need personal initiative to make decisions close to the action. Teams also need to strike just the right balance between planning and improvisation.”
Vasant Dhar: “Just like Internet platforms such as Google, Tiktok, Facebook and Netflix can serve up virtually any amount of supply required to meet demand. ChatGPT has similarly created an infinite supply of creative material on-demand at close to zero marginal cost. All you need is to prompt it appropriately. A very likely future is that AI will displace all but the most exceptional humans in many areas of our lives. However, those who survive will be have an amazing tool at their aid, and will combine their inherent talent with the wisdom they are able to extract from ChatGPT’s ever-expanding knowledge base. In effect, while previous technologies freed humans from grunt work, AI is becoming capable of all kinds of creative work. For humans, this will require constant upskilling. That’s a tall order for a lot of people, for whom Universal Basic Income will be a godsend.”
