Yuval Noah Hariri: “For the first time, we have real competition on the planet. We have been the most intelligent species by far for tens of thousands of years, and this is how we got from being an insignificant ape in the corner of Africa to being the absolute rulers of the planet and of the ecosystem. And now we are creating something that could compete with us in the very near future. The most important thing to know about AI is that it is not a tool, it is an agent, in the sense that it can make decisions independently of us. It can invent new ideas. It can learn and change by itself. All previous human inventions, whether the printing press or the atom bomb, are tools that empower us.”
FT: “In a laboratory outside Cambridge sits a remarkable “biological computer”. Its 200,000 human brain cells, grown in the lab, lie on silicon circuitry that communicates their synchronised electrical activity on a screen to the outside world. The CL1 device, about the size of two shoe boxes, was developed by Australian start-up Cortical Labs with the UK’s bit.bio, in a bid to create “synthetic biological intelligence” — a new form of computing that could offer opportunities beyond conventional electronics and other developing technologies such as quantum. “Like our brains, biological computers will consume many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional electronics as they process information. Future applications could include robotics, security and the metaverse,” Cortical Labs chief executive Hon Weng Chong told the Financial Times. The fast-growing search for alternatives to energy-intensive conventional electronics has stimulated the new field of biological computing, which aims to tap directly into the intelligence of brain cells rather than simulating it in silicon through “neuromorphic” processing and AI.”
The Atlantic: “The world economy is like a supercomputer that churns through trillions of calculations of prices and quantities, and spits out information on incomes, wealth, profits, and jobs. This is effectively how capitalism works—as a highly efficient information-processing system. To do that job, like any computer, capitalism runs on both hardware and software. The hardware is the markets, institutions, and regulatory regimes that make up the economy. The software is the governing economic ideas of the day—in essence, what society has decided the economy is for. Most of the time, the computer works quite well. But now and then, it crashes. Usually when that happens, the world economy just needs a software update—new ideas to address new problems. But sometimes it needs a major hardware modification as well. We are in one of those Control-Alt-Delete moments. Against the background of tariff wars, market angst about U.S. debt, tumbling consumer confidence, and a weakening dollar watched over by a heedless administration, globalization’s American-led era of free trade and open societies is coming to a close. The global economy is getting a hardware refit and trying out a new operating system—in effect, a full reboot, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century.”
FT: “Randomness is not just an important new ingredient for the artists of the 20th century. It turns out that chance is at the heart of the science that emerged during the last century. Physics post-Newton had raised the prospect that nothing was truly random, that if you know the equations of motion you can predict the future. The scientists of the early 20th century smashed this idea of determinism. Quantum physics reveals that randomness is at the heart of the way we must do science. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that this thread emerged in science and art at the same time. As Umberto Eco put it: “In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.””
