π Faster, Please! Week in Review #60
Please check out some great highlights from my essays and interviews!
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Melior Mundus
Some shameless self promotion: I have a book coming out on October 3. The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available for pre-order pretty much everywhere. Iβm very excited about it! Letβs gooooo! πβ‴π
Essay Highlights
π What is the outlook for long-term US economic growth?
Jones offers a realistic, if sobering, baseline that should set our current expectations about Americaβs future growth prospects. For example, itβs reasonable to view AI-machine learning and GenAI as a technological advance akin to the PC + internet combo rather than a sci-fi leap forward that will turn our current 2 percent trend in real GDP per capita into a 20 percent trend or something. That said, a big, frontier-leading economy thatβs able to continue its long-term growth trend has surely accomplished something pretty impressive.
But I think we can do better. Thereβs reason to think that GenAI may be more important in productivity terms than the PC + internet combo. And public policy could do far more to help boost the productive capacity of the American economy. Even though the βinvestment rate in ideasβ will flatten at some point, we could be investing a lot more in part of that IRI, specifically: basic science. Regular readers of this newsletter also know by now that we hardly have a regulatory structure in the US that is amenable to rapid technological deployment.
β Solarpunk futurism seems optimistic and whimsical. But not really.
Solarpunk is a speculative genre that envisions a sustainable utopian future where advanced technology β especially renewable solar and wind tech β and nature exist in seeming ecological harmony. I give solarpunk points for a) not embracing inevitable climate catastrophe and civilizational extinction and b) creating visually appealing images of the future. Youβll know the (often whimsical) solarpunk aesthetic when you see it: Lots of plants and other greenery that seem to be organically integrated into organic-looking architecture. Lots of of science-fictional treehouses. But solarpunk is more than just a pretty aesthetic (and more than just excessive optimism about renewable energy). And thatβs not just my opinion, as illustrated by a 2021 piece in Verge/Motherboard βSolarpunk Is Not About Pretty Aesthetics. It's About the End of Capitalismβ by Hannah Steinkopf-Frank who writes the following that makes clear AOCβs embrace of solarpunk is about more than just refreshing climate optimismβ¦ This newsletter and my upcoming book present a radically different and doable vision of the future.
π Are we experiencing an AI bubble?
Technology and technology stocks are two different things. An investment boom, bubble, and bust in a certain technology sector because of the emergence of a new kind of tech doesnβt mean that tech isnβt as significant as first hoped. A brief survey of American economic history over the past century shows as much. New tech repeatedly led to cycles of rapid growth and decline in various sectors. Both huge consumer demand and wild investor speculation drove up the number of companies and their valuations before the seemingly inevitable crash. Among them:
Radio.Β Massive demand for radios after World War I resulted in a proliferation of radio stations and manufacturers, such as RCA, which saw its share price increase by a whopping 10,000 percent in the 1920s. But the radio sector collapsed by 98 percent between 1929 and 1932 β the Great Depression didnβt help β and most radio manufacturers failed. Yet radio remains a hugely important technology.
Personal Computers.Β IBM was βBig Blueβ and the big dog in the computer market back in the 1980s, but it was hardly alone. There were lots of players, including both PC and video game console makers such as Atari, Coleco, Commodore, and Texas Instruments. But in 1983, several companies in the sector announced losses, share prices collapsed, and many PC manufacturers went out of business. Yet PCs remain a hugely important technology.
Internet.Β This one many of us remember quite clearly. Back in 1996, Yahoo! had a massive initial public offering with the stock jumping to $33 from $13 on its first day of trading. The Nasdaq composite index, home to the hottest tech stocks, increased fivefold over the period between 1995 and 2000. But the internet bubble burst in 2000, causing a massive decline in the value of hundreds of companies and the Nasdaq index, which fell by nearly 80 percent by 2002. Yet the Internet remains a hugely important technology, especially the PC + Internet combo.
Radio, PCs, and the internet are just three among many technologies that have been accompanied by financial bubbles since the start of the Industrial Revolution, although those three are used as examples by Goldman Sachs in the new analysis, βWhy AI is not a bubbleβ by its global strategy team. From that report: βRadical new technologies tend to attract significant capital and competition, and many companies eventually collapse, but this does not mean that the technology itself fails.β
β Weight-loss drugs seem like another bit of sci-fi becoming fact
If you need a newsy example of how innovation can drive economic growth, the good people of Denmark are providing a pretty clear example. In the first half of this year, Danish GDP rose at a 1.7 percent annualized rate thanks to the contribution of Novo Nordisk, the drug maker responsible for anti-obesity blockbusters Ozempic and Wegovy. Without soaring production and profits at Novo Nordisk, Danish GDP would have shrunk by 0.3 percent.
"We've never seen anything like it,β Jonas Petersen, an analyst at Statistics Denmark, told Euronews. βIt changes the appearance of the economy.β And while itβs hardly a perfect comparison, sales of the anti-obesity drugs turned Novo Nordisk into Europeβs most valuable company with a market capitalization equal to that of the entire Danish economy.
That said, the American people have played a big role in Novo Nordiskβs good financial fortune and are expected to continue to do so with estimates of the US share of sales ranging from 70 percent to 90 percent over the decade.
Now letβs think inΒ Faster, Please!Β terms about what Americans will be getting for their money besides more slender figures.
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ cultural critic Christine Rosen on AI and American society
Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on American history, society and culture, technology and culture, and feminism. While artificial intelligence advancements have no shortage of skeptics and naysayers, Christine offers the kind of thoughtful concern about AI that optimists and enthusiasts should grapple with.Β
What would it look like for an AI regulatory framework to take virtue and values into account?
First, such a framework would need to begin by focusing on what ends we are pursuing in our use of AI, rather than merely addressing the means of enabling it. We are at a critical moment where we can craft reasonable guidelines for safety and risk that are not merely reactionary, but also not so draconian that they stifle innovation. Where is the use of AI appropriate and in what areas of society might we decide it doesnβt belong? As we have seen with sophisticated algorithms that now determine everything from a personβs eligibility for a loan to their eligibility for parole, an uncritical embrace of new technological power can produce unintended consequences that are sometimes at odds with the values of a free society. For example, we should be asking what values our use of AI in fields such as K-12 education promote before AI is in widespread use in classrooms, and asking if it is ethical to employ AI in warfare or domestic and international surveillance.
Second, we should question whether our use of AI will potentially harm the most vulnerable members of society: Children, the elderly, people with special needs, and any other group that might be targeted for unnecessary surveillance, for example. What biases might be present in AI design that might limit the freedom of individuals and groups, and are the designers of AI systems able to identify and fix them? One of the challenges of AI in its early forms is that its designers are often unable to explain how or why much of it works β which suggests that it will be that much more difficult to reverse-engineer AI-enabled systems that produce harmful effects. We should also be asking who will be held responsible if AI does harm people.
Finally, and most importantly, what risk does AI pose to the healthy functioning of democracy? In a political culture already awash with misinformation and polarization, how will AI-enabled platforms worsen or improve our ability to foster deliberation and thoughtful policymaking? How might AI-enabled tools undermine democratic norms, rules, and institutions?
These questions might seem too broad or existential as companies race to bring AI products to market, but failing to ask them now merely delays having to deal with the fallout later, perhaps when we have already experienced serious unintended consequences from our use of AI.Β