Aswath Damodaran: “AI is the coming together of two forces — increasing (and cheaper) computing power and the cumulation of data, both quantitative and qualitative. As an AI novice, there are three dimensions on which I see it having an advantage over human beings: on mechanical/formulaic, as opposed to intuitive, work; in rule-based, rather of principle-based, disciplines; and on tasks with there is an objective answer, rather than subjective judgments. Bringing this down to the personal, the threat to your job or profession, from AI, will be greater if your job is mostly mechanical, rule-based and objective, and less if it is intuitive, principle-based and open to judgment. While AI, in its current form, may be unable to replace you at your job, it will get better over time, and it will learn more from watching what you do. So, what can you do to make it more difficult to be outsourced by machines or replaced by AI?”
Tyler Cowen on how tenure should be granted: “Not just on the basis of what you publish, but on what you contribute to the major AI models. So if you go to a major archive and, in some manner, turn it into AI-readable form, that should count for a good deal. It is no worse than publishing a significant article, though of course depending on the quality of the archive. As it stands today, you basically would get no credit for that. You would instead be expected to turn the archive into articles or a book, even if that meant unearthing far less data for the AIs. Turning data into books takes a long time — is that always what humans should be doing? Articles still count under this standard, as jstor seems to be in the literary “diet” of the major AI models. Wikipedia contributions should count for tenure, and any “hard for the AI to access data set” should count for all the more. Soon it won’t much matter whether humans read your data contribution, as long as the AIs do.”
WSJ: “Millennium parcels out the roughly $69 billion it manages for clients across more than 2,600 traders, analysts and other investment staffers working on hundreds of teams. Each team operates independently, betting on things like bonds converging or which companies get added to stock-market indexes or the outlook for commodity prices. But all of them face unusually tight limits on risk-taking, according to people familiar with the firm’s inner workings. For example, portfolio managers who are allocated $1 billion can lose only $50 million before that buying power will likely be cut in half. If they lose an additional $25 million, they will likely be fired. Protecting itself against even modest losses has made Millennium one of the most stable performers in the hedge-fund industry and made Israel “Izzy” Englander, the firm’s chief executive, a billionaire.”
NYTimes: “There is no reason that the basics of linguistics — how sounds actually work, why sentences come out the way they do, how language changes over time, how children learn language — should be taught only to college students who intentionally seek them out. We teach schoolchildren about many types of transformation, including history and evolution. Why not the one they encounter every time they open their mouths to speak?”
