🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #55
🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review #55
Please check out some highlights from my essays and interviews!
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
— Aye, robot!
— Tech tsunami: AI, quantum computing, and (🤞) superconductors— Is good news on the US economy really bad news? Productivity numbers will decide.
Best of 5QQ
— 5 Quick Questions for … policy analyst Neil Chilson on the new push for tech regulation
Essay Highlights
Automation is a powerful force that can change the way we work, but it doesn’t necessarily mean jobs will be lost. In some cases, automation can lead to job creation, and in other cases, it can simply change the skills that are needed for those jobs. That said, there’s good reason to be optimistic. In the 2020 paper “The Direct and Indirect Effects of Automation on Employment: A Survey of the Recent Literature,” economists look at what the existing literature and their research suggested about the effects of automation on employment. One view sees machines as mainly a jobs killer even if it might eventually lead to some new jobs being created because wages fall due to the job losses. Then there’s the view that when companies automate, they can produce goods and services more efficiently. This productivity increase lets them lower their prices while maintaining quality, which in turn increases demand for their products. The bigger market and sales volumes allow the companies to hire more workers. From the paper: “We provided direct empirical evidence supporting the second view, and we showed that the empirical literature on automation and employment was also leaning in that direction.”
🌊 Tech tsunami: AI, quantum computing, and (🤞) superconductors
Citigroup just released a lengthy report on quantum computers, probabilistic machines able to perform calculations based on the quantum states of matter such as with atoms or superconducting circuits. quantum computing and AI together create a sort of combinatorial windfall that boosts technological progress and, eventually, economic growth. Now add a third general-purpose technology, room-temperature superconductors. In a scenario where quantum computing enables more efficient and powerful AI, those quantum computers need to be supercold. Extremely low temperatures are crucial because the tiny building blocks of quantum computers, called qubits, are very sensitive to any disturbances, especially heat from their surroundings. Quantum computers need temperatures close to absolute zero. This brings us to room-temperature superconductors, which make quantum computers way easier and more cost-effective to operate. This superconductor news could be a replay of the 1989 “cold fusion” breakthrough that wasn’t. We could be seeing a GPT cluster every bit as important — and maybe more — as that of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Artificial general intelligence alone might be the equal of that Second IR cluster, it’s own tech boom. But some help would be great, too.
↕ Is good news on the US economy really bad news? Productivity numbers will decide.
Yesterday’s July jobs report certainly seemed to point toward a non-recessionary “soft landing” for the US economy. Non-farm payroll employment increased by a less-than-expected 187,000 in July after a downwardly revised 185,000 gain the month before, the two weakest monthly gains in two-and-a-half years. What might seem like “bad news” to many Americans — a weakening job market — can be interpreted as good news if you think slower growth is needed to tame inflation. The flip side, however, is that seemingly good news might better be interpreted as bad news. For example: Wage growth came in at a higher rate than forecast, with a 4.4 percent increase from the year-ago period. That means real wages are growing given a 3 percent inflation rate, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Here’s the problem: As The Wall Street Journal explains in its piece on the jobs report, “wage gains exceed both their prepandemic pace and a rate economists believe lines up with low, stable inflation. Fed officials would likely see 3.5% annual wage growth as consistent with inflation near their 2% target, assuming that worker productivity grows modestly.” The big question, then: Are we seeing the start of a productivity boom, perhaps driven in part by the wider and more capable use of AI/machine learning?
Best of 5QQ
💡 5 Quick Questions for … policy analyst Neil Chilson on the new push for tech regulation
Neil Chilson is a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. He was previously chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission.
Is it time for an AI regulator, too, as some policymakers are suggesting?
Again, AI is almost as general as internet. It's a very infrastructure-level technology, and it means many different things from self-driving cars to recommendation algorithms on your Facebook feed. It's hard to know what an AI regulator would specialize in. It would have to specialize in that broad set of issues. And we already have regulators that, say, regulate automobiles and driving and know what those problems are like, and agencies that look at things like what might be deceptive if it's put in your Facebook feed. I think before we do an AI regulator, we would really have to identify what specific set of problems are not being covered by these other agencies and what specific expertise would be needed.
I don't see any justification for that right now. I would say that this bill, the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act, is not touted as an AI regulator, but it would be under the definition that it would cover ChatGPT and Anthropic and all of the other pieces of software that are out there. It does contemplate it. There’s a whole definition of algorithms that includes things like generating content. It's not touted as an AI regulator, but it would be, in fact, that type of regulator.
