FT: “India has the potential to become the world’s research hub. But getting there warrants continued efforts to support the private sector, including by streamlining red tape around planning and foreign investment. Closer connections between India’s technical colleges, employers and investors can help support better job-matching, continued skills development, and start-up growth — which can turn jobseekers into job creators. In the longer term, India needs to invest in better education and support women to enter the formal workforce to shift more of its population away from precarious work. That will support income growth, and in turn drive further job creation. Having millions of workers in poorly paid, informal work, and talented graduates with too few jobs to go into is a major problem for the BJP. It is also an enormous waste of talent for India, and the world. Just as the nation tapped into globalisation in the 1990s to drive jobs and growth, it needs once again to ride the wave of global trends to take advantage of its “demographic dividend”.”
NYTimes: “For some entrepreneurs, generative A.I. is already a game changer. It is helping them write intricate code, understand complex legal documents, create posts on social media, edit copy and even answer payroll questions. The result, they say, is that A.I. allowed them to get their companies off the ground more quickly, and more efficiently, than they would have without it. The implications could be profound. Start-ups are a crucial well of job growth and economic resilience. By helping to drive innovation, they also contribute to higher productivity — one of the key promises of generative A.I. The technology “kind of gives you stilts to get through an obstacle — to get through a minefield,” said Steven Bright, who recently started Skittenz, a company that makes colorful coverings for mittens. “You can get from one point to another faster.””
Donald Boudreaux: “Price controls are government-dictated lies. By imposing price ceilings, the government forces markets to broadcast the lie that price-ceilinged goods and services are more abundant (and, hence, less valuable) than they really are. By imposing price floors, the government forces markets to broadcast the lie that price-floored goods and services are less abundant (and, hence, more valuable) than they really are. Market actors – producers and consumers – thus operate with less, and less-reliable, information. The inevitable results include shortages (in the case of price ceilings) and surpluses (in the case of price floors), waste, and corruption.”
HBR: “Generative artificial intelligence is expected to radically transform all kinds of jobs over the next few years. No longer the exclusive purview of technologists, AI can now be put to work by nearly anyone, using commands in everyday language instead of code. According to our research, most business functions and more than 40% of all U.S. work activity can be augmented, automated, or reinvented with gen AI. The changes are expected to have the largest impact on the legal, banking, insurance, and capital-market sectors—followed by retail, travel, health, and energy. For organizations and their employees, this looming shift has massive implications. In the future many of us will find that our professional success depends on our ability to elicit the best possible output from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT—and to learn and grow along with them. To excel in this new era of AI-human collaboration, most people will need one or more of what we call “fusion skills”—intelligent interrogation, judgment integration, and reciprocal apprenticing.”
Kazuo Ishiguro: “I used to think in terms of characters, how to develop their eccentricities and quirks. Then I realized that it’s better to focus on the relationships instead, and then the characters develop naturally. Relationships have to be natural, to be authentic human drama. I’m a little suspicious of stories that have an intellectual theme bolted on, when the characters stop and debate before they carry on.” [via Pocket]
