WSJ: “Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy argue in “Memory Lane” that our power of recollection is something of a marvel, its flaws simply the downsides of its strengths. Consider that the primary purpose of memory is to retain information likely to be of value in the future. Given our limited neurological resources, that requires us to forget anything inessential. A good memory is by necessity a bad one, in the sense that it must fail to recall most of what we have experienced. Forgetting has other benefits. We say that time heals, but it is the fading of memories, not the passing of days, that allows us to get over heartache and trauma.
WaPo: “A great hobby takes simple ingredients — a skein of yarn, a piece of lumber, a group of friendly strangers — and alchemizes them into something that makes day-to-day life better. But the relentless push toward self-optimization, the pressure to monetize every passion, and the pull of consumerism can tarnish the joy of hobbies.”
Sam Altman: “My favorite historical analog is the transistor for what AGI is going to be like. There’s going to be a lot of it, it’s going to diffuse into everything, it’s going to be cheap, it’s an emerging property of physics and it on its own will not be a differentiator…Where I think there’s strategic edges, there’s building the giant Internet company. I think that should be a combination of several different key services. There’s probably three or four things on the order of ChatGPT, and you’ll want to buy one bundled subscription of all of those. You’ll want to be able to sign in with your personal AI that’s gotten to know you over your life, over your years to other services and use it there. There will be, I think, amazing new kinds of devices that are optimized for how you use an AGI. There will be new kinds of web browsers, there’ll be that whole cluster, someone is just going to build the valuable products around AI. So that’s one thing. There’s another thing, which is the inference stack, so how you make the cheapest, most abundant inference. Chips, data centers, energy, there’ll be some interesting financial engineering to do, there’s all of that. And then the third thing is there will be just actually doing the best research and producing the best models. I think that is the triumvirate of value, but most models except the very, very leading edge, I think will commoditize pretty quickly.”
Gulzar: “The middle-class squeeze is being felt in India too. India’s fundamental economic problem of a narrow consumption base is compounded by an economy which is not creating the number of good jobs required to quickly expand the middle-class base to support sustained high growth rates…The vast majority of job creation is in gig work and the likes of construction, security guards, and housemaids, all of which generate monthly incomes in the range of Rs 15000-20000 and have limited productivity improvement opportunities and occupational mobility.”
Tyler Cowen on The Great Forgetting: “One example would be a lot of individuals today—some of them even economists—think rent control is maybe a decent idea. Several decades ago, virtually everyone would have realized that rent control creates shortages, quality problems, corruption. But bad ideas have been making a comeback. The use of excess inflation to try to stimulate the economy. Or the notion that high crime is not so bad for your city’s economy. We learned that lesson, but we seem to be forgetting that again.”
