NYTimes: “Online information — news stories, fictional works, message board posts, Wikipedia articles, computer programs, photos, podcasts and movie clips — has increasingly become the lifeblood of the booming A.I. industry. Creating innovative systems depends on having enough data to teach the technologies to instantly produce text, images, sounds and videos that resemble what a human creates. The volume of data is crucial. Leading chatbot systems have learned from pools of digital text spanning as many as three trillion words, or roughly twice the number of words stored in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which has collected manuscripts since 1602. The most prized data, A.I. researchers said, is high-quality information, such as published books and articles, which have been carefully written and edited by professionals. “The only practical way for these tools to exist is if they can be trained on massive amounts of data without having to license that data,” Sy Damle, a lawyer who represents Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, said of A.I. models last year in a public discussion about copyright law. “The data needed is so massive that even collective licensing really can’t work.” Tech companies are so hungry for new data that some are developing “synthetic” information.”
WSJ: “Having an idea of your so-called fitness age matters. You can slow various declines in health through relatively minor changes, say academics and health professionals. Cardiovascular changes, for example, have been shown to add years to your life. The first step is to track your fitness benchmarks in areas such as aerobic capacity and muscular endurance. Then, you should aim to keep them in an optimal range to help manage your aging, says Dr. Randall Espinoza, associate director at the UCLA Longevity Center.”
Arnold Kling: “We should keep thinking about the trend for technology to take us away from the immediate world. For most of human existence, we lived only in the immediate world. Stories and writing gave us access to remote worlds. Printing allowed us to spend more time in remote worlds. The telegraph gave us some real-time access to remote worlds. The age of mass media (TV, radio, magazines) made us really care about the remote world of celebrities, politicians, and sports stars. The Internet and smart phones completely confused the picture. Friends and family in our immediate world look like celebrities on line, and celebrities from the remote world on line try to enter our immediate world.”
FT: “The ultimate cause of stagnation is peace. As well as being the worst thing our species does, war is a creative spur. Several decades without an existential one might have had a drying-up effect on the western imagination…Wars are so frequent that one can always be tied to a chronologically adjacent invention. Still, the west’s Long Peace more or less maps on to the stagnation that Cowen and others describe. And it is possible to theorise how war might serve as a stimulant. First, the trauma forces the imagination into new and strange places. Second, the resulting ideas are easier to sell because the ruling ideas are so tainted with blood. Third, the violence itself often gives rise to some kind of technical innovation.”
Tyler Cowen: “The “digest” feature of AI will soon let you turn your feeds into summaries and pointers to the important parts. In other words, you will be able to consume those feeds more quickly. In some cases the quality of the feed experience may go up, in other cases it may go down (presumably over time quality of the digest will improve). We all know that if tech allows you to cook more quickly (e.g., microwave ovens), you will spend less time cooking. That is true even if you are “addicted” to cooking, if you cook because of social pressures, if cooking puts you into a daze, or whatever. The substitution effect still applies, noting that in some cases the new tech may make the cooked food better, in other cases worse. In similar fashion, you will spend less time with your feed, following the advent of AI feed digests.”
