Sanjeev Sanyal: “Ask yourself the following questions: Is there a need to spend four years on a university campus to attend lectures that are freely accessible online? Does the same lecture need to be delivered by thousands of professors every year when everyone can see it on YouTube, at their own convenience? The world’s best lecture on a topic can be uploaded once, and AI tools can handle most questions. This may not work entirely for primary school education where face-to-face hand-holding will still be needed, and for fields where hands-on experience is essential (say medicine); perhaps also where knowledge is still evolving (say at Masters or PhD level). However, a mostly online system of imparting knowledge and skills can work for most undergraduate-level subjects. Of course, we will still need a standardised curriculum to guide students, and a good system of examination to test knowledge retention. The resource requirement for doing this, however, is a fraction of what is needed to run large campuses with hundreds of acres of land, lecture halls and hostels. Moreover, with low scaling costs, it should be possible to provide a high-quality course in each subject available virtually free to all citizens. Any Indian can earn a degree in any subject, at their own pace, as long as they can pass the required tests. Freed from the burden of lecturing, meanwhile, India’s academia can then focus on research and expanding the frontiers of knowledge.”
NYTimes: “Flat structures tend to work best at smaller companies, including start-ups, according to Saerom (Ronnie) Lee, an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “As firms hire more employees and grow in their size, they typically encounter significant challenges in coordinating these employees.” But do flat structures work? André Spicer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Bayes Business School in London, said that, while the “cultural zeitgeist when I was growing up was that hierarchies are bad,” there’s been an increasing recognition of both the need for them and the fact that they often reappear in businesses that, at least theoretically, reject them. “People aren’t just willing to jump on the bandwagon and say, ‘Yeah, let’s have this nonhierarchical structure.’ There’s some degree of suspicion around it.””
NYTimes: “For the most part, tech companies are now rolling out four kinds of generative A.I. products for businesses: features and services that generate code for software engineers, create new content such as sales emails and product descriptions for marketing teams, search company data to answer employee questions, and summarize meeting notes and lengthy documents.”
Bastiat: “Consume – Consumer – Consumption; these are ugly words that represent people as so many barflies, constantly with a coffee cup or a wine glass in front of them. But political economy is obliged to use them. (I am referring to the three words, not the wine glass.) It does not dare to invent others, as it has found these ready-made.Let us nevertheless set out what they mean. The aim of work, both cerebral and manual, is to satisfy one of our needs or desires. There are therefore two terms in economic evolution: effort and reward. Reward is the product of effort. It takes effort to produce; enjoying the reward is to consume.” [via CafeHayek]
