NYTimes: “For many in China, the strength of its education system is closely tied to the nation’s global status. The government has invested heavily in higher education, and the number of university graduates each year, once minuscule, has grown more than 14-fold in the past two decades. Several Chinese universities now rank among the world’s best. Still, for decades, China’s best and brightest students have gone abroad, and many have stayed there. By some metrics, that is starting to change. China produced more than four times as many STEM graduates in 2020 as the United States. Specifically in A.I., it has added more than 2,300 undergraduate programs since 2018, according to research by MacroPolo, a Chicago-based research group that studies China.”
FT: “The leaders of America, Russia and China are now all committed to territorial expansion…The world may be moving from an era where smaller countries could claim the protection of international law to one in which, as Thucydides put it, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”…The rise of imperialist ideologies also has implications for domestic politics. Empires tend to have emperors. Putin and Xi’s expansionist foreign policies go hand in hand with a cult of personality at home and political repression. Trump’s overseas ambitions are combined with an intense focus on crushing “the enemy within”.”
Anthropic Economic Index: Understanding AI’s effects on the economy over time. “Today, usage is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks. Over one-third of occupations (roughly 36%) see AI use in at least a quarter of their associated tasks, while approximately 4% of occupations use it across three-quarters of their associated tasks. AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks. AI use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.”
Hollis Robbins: “University leaders must take a hard look at every academic function a university performs, from knowledge transmission to research guidance, skill development, mentoring, and career advising, and ask where the function exceeds AGI capabilities, or it has no reason to exist. Universities will find that faculty experts offer the only value worth paying tuition to access.”
George Gilder: “The chief source of new wealth and growth is entrepreneurial disruption of incumbent wealth.” [via CafeHayek]
