Ethan Mollick: “Agency is the initiative to act. Increasingly, it is going to determine what happens next with AI, and whether that is good or bad for us. But whose agency? Human agency, the willingness to push, experiment and act without waiting for instructions, seems increasingly important to getting value out of AI, and I have a longer post on that coming soon. But this post is about the agency of AI, and how the choices we make about how to use it (or constrain it) will shape all of our futures. For much of the last few years, the AI would sit in a chat window until you asked it for something. Even when it became capable of doing hours of work, you generally had to decide what work to give it. That is no longer always true.”
FT: “Nvidia founder Jensen Huang has predicted that “every industrial company will become a robotics company” as AI expands from the digital to the physical realm, while Elon Musk is pumping tens of billions of dollars into Tesla’s pivot from electric vehicles to robotaxis and humanoids. The prospect is exciting Wall Street and Silicon Valley, with manufacturing start-ups that offer “robotics-as-a-service” attracting valuations redolent of software companies.”
Telegraph India: “What India is entering is a modal re-ordering. Trains will reclaim short and medium corridors where they can genuinely compete. Airlines will be pushed towards longer hauls and international markets wherein no platform announcement can reach them. The domestic golden age of Indian aviation may be entering its final chapter. The relevant question for investors and policymakers is not whether the train arrives. It is whether they have already moved to a different terminal.”
Business Standard: “India’s R&D spending has hit a record 0.84% of GDP, but reaching the global technology frontier will require much higher private-sector investment and smarter public funding.”
