WSJ: “Altos Labs, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Cambridge, U.K., is working on ways to rejuvenate cells to eliminate disease—an approach called epigenetic reprogramming. [Robert] Nelsen and Altos’s founders believe they can turn the clock back on aging cells to restore functions characteristic of younger cells…“Epigenetic reprogramming is the biggest thing in healthcare in 100 years. Or ever,” he says. “We will clearly live much healthier and longer lives if this works.” That’s a huge if. Cellular rejuvenation has yet to be proven effective as a treatment. So far, the only data Altos and others in the field have produced is in mice, suggesting they are a long way from rolling out any products. Skeptics doubt cells can be reprogrammed to ward off age-related illnesses.”
Adam Grant: “The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents? People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picked systematically. But in multiple experiments led by the psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true. Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill. Why were randomly chosen leaders more effective? They led more democratically. “Systematically selected leaders can undermine group goals,” Dr. Haslam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to “assert their personal superiority.” When you’re anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head: I’m the chosen one.”
Mint: “Exporters have every reason to keep importing components—and claim duty drawbacks. Self-reliance, the slogan under which the programme is being marketed, may be an illusion. Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Indian central bank, has shown that after adding major parts that go into phones, the country may have become a bigger net importer than before. PLI incentives are on incremental production, but the tariffs are on total costs. When the handouts eventually end, the elevated duties would bite. India’s own history is littered with cautionary tales of excessive state control. Erecting protectionist walls didn’t work in the past. High tariffs and a new licence requirement on imported computers, laptops and tablets…may not help make India the next factory to the world even now.”
Economist: “What could large-language models change in [the US elections of] 2024? One thing is the quantity of disinformation: if the volume of nonsense were multiplied by 1,000 or 100,000, it might persuade people to vote differently. A second concerns quality. Hyper-realistic deepfakes could sway voters before false audio, photos and videos could be debunked. A third is microtargeting. With AI, voters may be inundated with highly personalised propaganda at scale. Networks of propaganda bots could be made harder to detect than existing disinformation efforts are. Voters’ trust in their fellow citizens, which in America has been declining for decades, may well suffer as people began to doubt everything.”
