Hollis Robbins: “While we worry about AI replacing human judgment, the real story may be how AI is creating a market for that judgment into a luxury good, available only to those who can pay for the “last mile” of human insight. What do I mean by this?…What I’m calling “the last mile” here is the last 5-15% of exactitude or certainty in making a choice from data, for thinking beyond what an algorithm or quantifiable data set indicates, when you need something extra to assurance yourself you are making the right choice. It’s what the numbers don’t tell you. It’s what you hear when you get on the phone to check a reference. There are other terms for this — the human factor or the human element, but these terms don’t get at the element of distance between what metrics give you and what you need to make a decision. Scale leaves us with this last mile of uncertainty. As AI is going to do more and more matching humans with products and services (and other people), the last mile problem is going to be the whole problem. ”
FT: “Formula One is the world’s most technologically advanced sport. For more than a century, it has been an incubator of future technologies for the automotive, oil and tyre industries. So it is hardly surprising that the motorsport is now attracting companies working in artificial intelligence. This rapidly evolving technology is set to reshape the data-intensive field of Grand Prix racing. Some engineers are predicting AI could one day take on the full design of a car, but the technology is not expected to replace the driver — autonomous car racing debuted earlier this year in a separate Abu Dhabi-funded motorsport series. Each F1 car is fitted with 300 sensors, generating 1.1mn data points per second on the track. And the key to improving the performance of car and driver is to process that huge volume of information as quickly as possible — a task that AI makes easier.”
NYTimes: “Its vibrant purple petals notwithstanding, the saffron flower (Crocus sativus) is valued primarily for what hides beneath those petals: tiny, fiery orange stamens that, once plucked and processed, become the world’s most expensive spice, one that adds sweet flavor and deep golden color to dishes as culinarily disparate as Spanish paella, South Asian pulao and Swedish St. Lucia buns. Known botanically as a triploid owing to its three sets of chromosomes, the saffron crocus can neither grow wild nor reproduce without human intervention. Instead the plant must be propagated and harvested manually, a laborious undertaking that Bronze Age Greeks are believed to have pioneered and that helps account for its price. Today saffron is grown in a latitudinal belt that runs from the Mediterranean to South Asia, with Iran currently contributing about 85 percent of the global supply. But saffron from Kashmir is arguably the most highly prized, says Sana Javeri-Kadri.”
AIER on the economic consequences of populism: “The Americans who succumbed to political lures and failed to wind down, halt, block, or attenuate the New Deal were our great grandparents, or at the very least, our forerunners. Americans today owe it to them to forgive that error – and remember it. After all, they and we are one people. It is possible therefore to extend the sage Anderson’s point. The Great Depression did not endure because God struck America. It endured because our leaders played God. And because we let them.”
