Gulzar: “Consider the fundamental question facing government officials in a few departments. What’s required to achieve student learning outcomes and create a skilled and employable workforce? What’s required to deliver good quality public health and sanitation to prevent epidemics, maternal and child health, and diagnostic-cum-treatment services? What’s required to improve crop productivity and raise farmer incomes? What’s required to ensure hassle-free access to good quality municipal facilities and services? Education, Health, Agriculture, and Municipal Administration officials must figure out the answers to their respective fundamental challenges and then execute them. Let’s use a framework to analyse each sector. Government departments apply inputs, including those from programs and schemes, and undertake a set of tasks. The department’s theory of change is that their effective combination would lead to its desired outcomes.”
Arnold Kling: “I teach that the profitability of an asset is equal to its rental rate plus its appreciation rate minus the interest rate. For example, suppose you invest $400,000 in an apartment on which you can collect $20,000 a year in rent. Then the rental rate is 5 percent. If the rent and the market price of the apartment each go up at 2 percent per year, then the appreciation rate is 2 percent. And if the interest rate that you pay to finance the property (or the opportunity cost that you give up by not earning interest on money you have tied up in the property) is 6 percent, then that is the interest rate in my basic formula. In this example, the profitability = 5 + 2 – 6 = 1 percent. The apartment is a good investment, because profitability is greater than zero…An asset is a hedge against inflation if and only if it can be relied on to appreciate more if inflation takes off. So-called “real” assets are supposed to do that. These include gold (or commodities in general), stocks, Bitcoin, real estate, and inflation-indexed bonds (TIPs).”
Vasant Dhar: “What makes general intelligence uniquely challenging for us to govern is the fact that its design lacks a specific purpose. Previous technologies, including previous AI machines, were created with a purpose, such as medical diagnosis, engineering design, planning, customer support, and so on. We could turn off such applications at will when they didn’t satisfy our goals or expectations or became obsolete. In contrast, current pre-trained AI machines are the first ever to be designed with no other goal than to be able to converse with us intelligently. Everyone relates to it, and it is intertwining itself rapidly into our lives. At a high school recently, no homework was turned in one day because ChatGPT wasn’t available. Fort children coming of age post 2022, AI is interacting with their brains all the time. They’re going increasingly to AI over humans for answers, entertainment, and even companionship. There’s no going back or turning it off. It’s here to stay, so it’s a good time to think about whether we need new laws or guardrails for AI.”
RestOfWorld: “With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is not just the most popular messaging app in the world — it’s a digital lifeline. Its closest competitors, WeChat (1.3 billion users) and Facebook Messenger (1 billion users), pale in comparison. In many parts of the world, WhatsApp is synonymous with the internet itself. For Nigerian content creators, Brazilian shopkeepers, and Indian aunties, it is often the only app they need. On WhatsApp, you can chat with friends and family, attend school, run a business, catch up on the news, shop, and even bank. Increasingly, it’s where people watch TV, book medical appointments, and arrange dates…WhatsApp, originally developed as a lightweight tool for sending simple texts to friends, has by now become something infinitely bigger, more complicated, and more surprising. The app has been repurposed and remade by niche communities and for diverse cultural activities in ways that many in the West could never imagine — and in ways that its creators never expected.” More: “It’s still early days, but WhatsApp’s efforts to generate revenue this way are beginning to pay off. Meta now makes billions of dollars from the “click-to-message” ads that businesses purchase. Meta also charges tens of thousands of large enterprises, from Air France to Volvo, to send messages through its premium API, which includes a full suite of marketing, payment, and other features. While Meta’s paid messaging tools brought in about $1 billion last year — peanuts compared to the whopping $132 billion the company earned from ads — paid messaging revenue is growing far faster than ad revenue and has more than doubled since early 2023.”
