Category: Uncategorized

The most useful phrase about AI you will read this month

From Cory Doctorow’s indispensable Pluralistic: That’s the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we’re nowhere near a…

The goal of data analysis is to kill time

You probably know this, but maybe you don’t know you know. The takeaway first: One of the foundations of what…

Quick link: Manufacturing delaborization and development strategy (with notes on Argentina)

Brad DeLong — a professor of Economics at Berkeley and, among other things, the author of “Slouching Towards Utopia,” probably…

Informal paper: “Technology portfolio modeling, generative AI, and optimal fund design”

I’m posting a minor update of an informal paper I wrote a while ago using arguments from standard portfolio theory…

Quick link: Burning the world and/or USD 400 billion a year

The IEA report: The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions The key part: Oil and gas companies investments…

The one AI-related existential risk I’m worried about

People who have been fascinated since their youth with the idea that a certain thing is going to break the…

Quick link: When it comes to causal knowledge, every little bit (of lowered entropy) helps

The paper: Not Causal or Descriptive But Some Secret, Other Thing: Entropy as a Criterion for Causal Learning What it…

And now for something different: architecture and the Metaverse

I had the privilege of collaborating with Micaela Mantegna on The Anti-Metaverse: Multispace and the Intersections of Reality, an article…

Quick link: First data points on the impact of ChatGPT on employment

The paper: The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market What they did:…

Using protein language models to accelerate their artificial evolution works; the interesting part is why.

The Nature paper Efficient evolution of human antibodies from general protein language models has already made the rounds, and deservingly…