NYTimes: “Peering into their computer screens in California last year, the data crunchers watched a subterranean fortune come into focus. What they saw transported them 10,000 miles across the world, to Zambia, and then one more mile straight down into the Earth. A rich lode of copper, deep in the bedrock, appeared before them, its contours revealed by a complex A.I.-driven technology they’d been painstakingly building for years…Their company, KoBold Metals, informed its business partners that their find is likely the largest copper discovery in more than a decade. According to their estimates, reviewed by The New York Times, the mine would produce at least 300,000 tons of copper a month once fully operational. That corresponds to a value of billions of dollars a year, for decades.”
Veronique de Rugy: “Innovation is fundamentally incompatible with industrial policy, which involves government promotion — using subsidies and tariffs — of particular industries or technologies. It is planning based on what already exists, what is already known, and what government officials can conceive. By necessity, it excludes genuine innovation because innovation is creative. Innovation creates possibilities that didn’t previously exist. Future innovations, therefore, can’t possibly be part of today’s industrial-policy plan.”
WSJ: “When China launched its one-child policy more than four decades ago, it sped up an evolution toward smaller family sizes that would have happened more gradually. The policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money. For years, just as China was opening its economy, the share of working-age Chinese grew faster than the parts of the population that didn’t work. That was a big factor in China’s economic miracle. There was a price and China is now paying it. Limiting births then means fewer workers now, and fewer women to give birth. A United Nations forecast published [recently] shows how quickly China is aging, a demographic crunch that the U.N. predicts will cut China’s population by more than half by the end of the century.” Business Standard: “India has only 38 years before its population starts shrinking.”
FT on AI: “There’s a paradox here common to all new tech platforms. As the cost of using the new technology plunges, customers could theoretically get away with buying less. But rapidly falling costs usually lead to new uses being found, and demand instead soars. As with everything to do with generative AI, this is happening at warp speed, and it is hard to tell how closely this will mirror other disruptive tech cycles. At some point, of course, all of this investment has to earn a return. If not, then the chief executives who have been pushed by their boards and by fear of competition to demand their companies find uses for generative AI will eventually lose patience and move on. But all indications are that we’re not at that point yet.”
