WSJ: “[Two minutes] is the amount of time dentists say it takes, twice a day, for adequate plaque removal. The problem is people tend to fall way short—focus groups show that even people who say they brush for two minutes actually do so for about 45 seconds.”
Andrew Chen: “I think AI will disrupt [Hollywood], but also be adopted and assimilated. There will be new consumption experiences that compete directly with film/TV, but also ones that indirectly compete. It’ll all happen. After all, if you went back in time 20 years and realized that online content would have been big, you might have thought: Let’s go strong form. People will just watch internet content, don’t worry about where the incumbent media formats will go. Yet both Netflix and YouTube worked. You’d ideally have bet on both. I think the same thing will work. The AI Horde is so powerful that we’ll see it reinvent Hollywood, gaming, YouTube, and more. It’ll affect the content, yes, but also AI tools, and AI-enabled companies, and much more.”
FT: “Businesses selling everything from pizzas to cars have been hit by Indonesia’s shrinking middle class. The number of people considered to be middle class by the government has declined 20 per cent over the past six years, a risk to the commodity giant’s growth plans and a warning for potential investors such as Apple. Economists said the decline had been triggered by a lack of formal employment, a shortage of investment in higher-income industries and overreliance on a commodities sector that has produced poorly paid work — pressures that have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Zhang Hongjiang: “How do we design and control the more powerful AI systems of the future so that they do not escape human control?…For instance: an AI system [should] never replicate and improve itself. This red line is super important. When the system has the capability to reproduce itself, to improve itself, it gets out of control. Second is deception. AI systems should never have the capability to deceive humans. Another obvious one is that AI systems should not have the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons. Also, AI systems should never have persuasion power . . . stronger than humans.”
Scott Sumner: “I think of Bitcoin as sort of like electronic gold. Gold is a store of value for the boomer generation, and Bitcoin is store of value for the zoomer generation—for people brought up in the era of iPhones and computers. Gold has a few industrial uses, but most of its value comes from its use as a store of value. People value gold primarily because they believe that in the future other people will value gold. Bitcoin is occasionally used in transactions, but most of its value comes from its use as a store of value. People value Bitcoin primarily because they believe that in the future other people will value Bitcoin.”
