WSJ: “Generative AI makes voice interactions with devices more productive—and a lot less annoying…Speaking > typing. Today’s voice-transcription AIs have crossed an accuracy threshold: It’s now more convenient to dictate a message than to type it…Talking = the new touch screen. If you’re driving your car and inspiration strikes, you don’t pull out a laptop and start pounding away…Talking to devices makes those moments of inspiration easier to capture.”
NYTimes: “Ricursive aims to build A.I. systems that can improve the design of these enormously complex chips. If A.I. systems can produce better chips, they argue, the chips will produce better A.I. systems. And then the process would repeat on and on as technology got better and better…“The first phase of the company is just to accelerate chip design,” Dr. Goldie said. “But if we have the ability to design chips very quickly, why not just use that ourselves? Why not build our own chips? Why not train our own models? Why not co-evolve them?””
Ruchir Sharma: “Every tech revolution has inspired fears that innovation will destroy jobs. While those fears have never played out, artificial intelligence is cast as much more disruptive because it has the potential to perform so many tasks the way people do — or better. Is the threat to human labour that different and dire this time? What the current obsession with AI overlooks is that another (counter) force is also advancing rapidly. In the past four decades, the number of countries in which the working age population is shrinking has risen from zero to 55, including most of the major economies. This collapse is accelerating now because families are having even fewer children than expected…There are signs AI is already raising output per worker, which could lower overall demand for human labour. But against a backdrop of rapid population decline, the marvels of AI are more likely to ease the coming labour shortages than trigger mass unemployment.”
WSJ: “The AI era will usher in a new style of warfighting “driven by algorithms, with unmanned systems as the main fighting force and swarm operations as the primary mode of combat,” a group of Chinese military theorists wrote in October 2024. They likened AI’s potential to transform the military to gunpowder, a technology invented in China but more effectively weaponized, many in China believe, by others. Drones, for their part, have emerged as key weapons on the battlefields of Ukraine, where strategies and technology for their use have developed quickly under the pressure of real fighting. Drone swarms can be used as decoys that can force an enemy to burn through munitions, as spies and as devastating weapons that can take out enemy soldiers and tanks in suicide missions.”
