City Journal: “Machines can now talk with us in ways that aren’t preprogrammed. They can draw pictures, write passable (if generic) college essays, and make fake videos so convincing that you and I can’t tell the difference. The first time I used ChatGPT, I almost forgot that I was communicating with a machine. Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created. It consumes vast amounts of data and organizes itself in ways that its creators didn’t foresee and don’t understand. “If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside,” AI scientist Sam Bowman told Noam Hassenfeld at Vox, “you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second. And we just have no idea what any of it means.”…So what do we actually know? That AI is coming faster than almost anyone realizes, that the pace of change will accelerate, and that nobody—not computer researchers, not economists, not historians, and definitely not me—knows where we’re heading. But for what it’s worth, I see artificial intelligence as something like fire: it will warm us, and it will burn us.”
NYTimes: “China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled. Get ready for an even bigger display of China’s solar energy dominance…At the annual session of China’s legislature [recently], Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects. With China’s economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China’s leaders say that a “new trio” of industries — solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries — has replaced an “old trio” of clothing, furniture and appliances.”
Economist: “The world is in the midst of a city-building boom…Edward Glaeser of Harvard University has lauded cities as mankind’s greatest invention. He notes that agglomerations of money and talent make societies richer, smarter and greener. Since companies move closer to their customers and people closer to their jobs, growing cities beget economic growth. Economists think that doubling a city’s population provides a boost to productivity of 2-5%. Given both the pressing need for new urban areas and the constraints on physical growth in existing ones, starting afresh is sometimes a shrewd decision.”
Chris Dixon: “A much better outcome would be to construct a new covenant, a new relationship between content providers, AI, distribution, and search engines. What is the natural way to do that? Get large groups of people to coordinate on the internet and create networks. That’s what blockchains are. It’s the technology for creating networks that are open and governed by the participants. There are a bunch of entrepreneurs working on things like this, where you basically think of them as economic networks, where content providers can join, AI providers can join. They can come and agree on terms and collectively decide on what the optimal relationship is for everybody to have the best outcome. We didn’t really have systems like this on the internet before, where you could come together and have large groups of people collectively decide on what kind of economic relationship they’d have.”
WSJ: “Delivering a reality check to an overconfident underperformer is one of the toughest tasks bosses face, because there is no guarantee critiques will click. “I had somebody who outright told me, ‘I heard your feedback, but I disagreed with it,’ ” says Sara Censoprano, associate director of client experience at Movable Ink, a marketing software company. She has decided to be more explicit with staff about what’s a recommendation and what’s an order. She also asks new members of her team how they want to hear constructive criticism. Managers who dread the inevitable confrontations with clueless people would be wise to ask, up front, whether employees prefer bad news face-to-face, or in an email, so they can digest it ahead of a conversation, Censoprano says. As a boss, it’s a way to C.Y.A. against future complaints about your leadership.”
