Nicholas Decker: “Manufacturing firms are much smaller in India and grow much less over time than in America (Hsieh and Klenow, 2014). However, when we look around the world, we see a similar story. People are moving out of the countryside, but into providing services in cities, not manufacturing.”
Derek Thompson: “Phones are global, but what’s on our phones is exquisitely individual. For this reason, overall phone effects are hard to study. They are best understood as a relentless information-delivery system whose utility or harm is exquisitely dependent on the type of information that people access. This might explain why cultures with more anxious or polarizing content—such as the U.S.—see higher and faster rates of anxiety and polarization. Rather than adopt an empirical nihilism about all this (ah, well, phones are complicated, let’s just do nothing!), we should pay close attention to the consistent finding that people tend to be a little happier and little more attentive when they un-hook from the information-IV drip of their personal devices.”
FT: “The problem is that these algorithms are by their nature backward-looking: they serve us content based on what we have already liked. And so we keep on being fed the same diet. We talk a lot about AI slop, but often it’s simply regurgitating the human-generated slop already out there. And so we find ourselves in the grips of what Theodor Adorno might have called a “mimetic regression” — and a ferocious one at that. We must fight back against our algorithmic overlords. If we don’t, we might be stuck in a risk-averse, slop-filled, cultural feedback loop forever.”
WSJ: ““TBPN,” shorthand for Technology Business Programming Network, treats technology news with the seriousness of a sportscaster describing a winning play. It is widely followed by tech enthusiasts, from industry practitioners to AI-curious young people. OpenAI is trying to change long-established habits around how people interact with technology, and fight growing anxiety about the impact that AI will have on the workforce and society writ large. Within Silicon Valley, it is battling for mind-share among young startup founders, software engineers and tech executives whose perceptions are largely shaped by what they see on social media—specifically X. That is where “TBPN” comes in.”
