NYTimes: “Short books offer something to read when you want to surrender to a story for longer than an hour, but not for days and days. They are hefty enough to immerse yourself in and often short enough to finish before midnight, even with a distracted, 21st-century attention span. Even with a headline-weary mind…In a small book with each perfect word in its perfect place, feel your own sorrows fade as you surrender to the spell of a story.”
Lant Pritchett: “Economists have a long history of measuring the costs of barriers to trade that introduce distortions in prices. So I actually was trained as a PhD economist my main field was trade. So you can measure the costs of having a tariff or a ban on certain goods by the price differential. So in a paper I did with a couple of co-authors, we measured as best we could the price differential of what an equivalent productivity worker would earn in the United States versus their home country. And we found that the price differential of equal productivity labour was a factor of five. And I say a factor of five ‘coz usually as economists, we measure price distortions as per cent. So you have a tariff of 10 per cent or 25 per cent, whereas this is 400 per cent. So, the tax essentially on the consumer of labour in a rich country has a 400 per cent tax on it. So it’s five times more costly than if you were allowed access to a worker who would willingly come and do the same job.”
NYTimes: “When companies build A.I. systems, they go big first: They feed these systems enormous amounts of data. The more data companies feed into these systems, the more powerful they become. Just as a student learns more by reading more books, an A.I. system can improve its skills by analyzing ingesting larger pools of data. Chatbots like ChatGPT learn their skills by ingesting practically all the English language text on the internet. That requires larger and larger amounts of computing power from giant data centers. Inside those data centers are computers packed with thousands of specialized computer chips called graphics processing units, or GPUs, which can cost more than $30,000 apiece. The cost is pushed higher because the chips, data centers and electricity needed to do this digital work are in short supply. Sean Holzknecht, chief executive of Colovore, a data center operator whose facilities are adopting specialized chips used to build A.I., said this new kind of computing facility cost 10 to 20 times what a traditional data center does.”
Arnold Kling: “Who do we tend to trust? a. People who communicate in a way that we can understand. You cannot learn chemistry from a lecturer speaking in Mandarin, unless you understand that language. b. People with a reputation for knowing what they are talking about. c. People with whom you feel a bond. You trust someone who appears to care about you. You distrust someone who you believe is willing to mistreat you. These are not necessarily the people that we should trust.”
Sarah Bird: “I think generative AI is materially different and more exciting than other AI technology, in my opinion. The reason is that it has this amazing ability to meet people where they are. It speaks human language. It understands your jargon. It understands how you are expressing things. That gives it the potential to be the bridge to all other technologies or other complex systems. We can take someone who, for example, has never programmed before and actually allow them to control a computer system as if they were a programmer. Or you can take someone who, for example, is in a vulnerable situation and needs to navigate government bureaucracy, but doesn’t understand all the legal jargon — they can express their questions in their own language and they can get answers back in a way that they understand. I think the potential for lifting people up and empowering people is just enormous with this technology. It actually speaks in a way that is human and understands in a way that feels very human — [that] really ignites people’s imagination around the technology.”
