Russ Roberts: “Google is dominating search, and search is–it’s so important. They’re making so much money and there’s no competition because it’s the best one. Now all of a sudden it looks archaic. I want to make a recipe, and I put tomato, onion, garlic, oregano, and I say, ‘Find me a recipe,’ and Google pulls up a page from a cooking website; and I got to click on it, look through it. I tell Claude I want to make tomato sauce and make it interesting. It gives me the recipe in less than five seconds. It adds a Korean spice, which I can’t pronounce–which I even had, but I didn’t have enough of it. So I said, ‘Let me add capers and anchovies.’ It immediately redid the recipe. And, at the end for fun, it said, ‘Here’s five things you could do to spice it up.'”
NYTimes: “I think it’s a mistake to write off A.I. agents. When they become more capable, they could start to substitute for human workers in some occupations…Setting a bunch of A.I. agents loose on the internet could also provoke a backlash from web publishers, e-commerce sites and other businesses that rely on human-generated traffic to pay their bills. (If you’re a business buying ads on Amazon, you want those ads to be seen by humans, not bots pretending to be humans.) In the future, I can imagine more websites taking steps to block A.I. agents or steer them toward certain pages or products. Right now, A.I. agents are too incompetent to be much of a threat. But it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a near future when most of the web will consist of robots talking to robots, buying things from robots and writing emails that only other robots will read. The self-driving internet is almost here, in other words — get your clicks in while you can.”
Arnold Kling: “Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought takes the view that the ingredients in human thought are metaphors. Even the sentence I just wrote uses “ingredients” as a metaphor. If you stop and consider anything you read or say, you will find that it involves metaphors. Metaphors are neither true nor false. They are either more or less appropriate and insightful. The metaphor of an atom as having a nucleus that is like a planet with electrons orbiting around it like moons is useful in some ways, misleading in others…When we think, we are trying to apply metaphors. When I learn something new, I think of myself as taking metaphors that I know and using them to interpret a new metaphor or set of metaphors. I think of creativity as coming up with a new synthesis of metaphors…AI “reasoning” as searching a space of analogies.”
The Generalist: “Every entrepreneur needs an early believer, whether they’re building a software platform or a fund. Ideally, more than one. Having someone else validate the potential of a dream brings it out of the realm of delusion and into the light.”
Economist: “Meeting Indians’ longer-term aspirations is a much more difficult task. It means building a broader middle class and supporting the creation of good working-class jobs. Although the country’s highly competitive services sector provides strong export earnings, it does little for employment. Manufacturing, which tends to be better at soaking up labour, has fallen as a share of GDP to just 13%, its lowest since 1967. Private capital investment, rather than the state-directed kind in bridges, ports and railways, has been sluggish for decades. India’s official unemployment rate may be low at 3.2%, but millions struggle in poorly paid informal work. Moreover, the path to prosperity beaten by China, South Korea and other Asian countries—building low-value manufacturing, before then attracting more complicated forms of industry—is becoming much narrower. The world has entered an era of protectionism and tariffs, and India must cope with the flood of cheap goods from China and an increasingly difficult American market.”
