This is where I save interesting links.
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From Dollar Dominance to Slop Machine
Pt. 2 on attention and a bunch of topics that are funneling through it these days. I say topics, but really they are the things that impact the every day: trust, social safety, integrity, etc.
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Would live
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Are Cultural Products Getting Longer?
This is a great counterfactual to attention span narratives. It doesn’t speak to quality, but to attention span. Brain Rot seems to be a real thing (on the surface) but we don’t enjoy it.
It seems like we’re immunizing by consuming longer content.
I notice this with the kids. They’re more engaged with a movie compared to five twenty minute episodes of a show.
Anyways, good news on the attention front.
Now is a great time to be a (unalgorithmic) human.
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The AGI Economy is Coming Faster Than You Think
From Rohit Krishnan in Freethink (new to me).
If Pascal’s Wager can be applied the “when AGI”, and I think it certainly can be, it feels wiser to me to assume the kind of thinking below is more likely than not.
What to do about that? I have no idea. I don’t see myself rapidly “retooling” and “upskilling” my career at the moment – both feel mysterious as to how and in what direction – so if we are 1-5 years away from this massive upheaval it is currently coming at me and I’m not sure what I’m ‘doing’.
I continue to think that opting to be more human (analog vs. synthetic) is the smartest gamble. Perhaps now is the best time to do the oldest things that humans have always found interesting: Write a book, keep a garden, and see what the body is capable of (running for me).
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Is now the best time to write a novel?
From this post, “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction.”
I think the most important conclusion is that all of this is actually good news for aspiring writers: it’s not that the philistine dopamine-addled masses will never be capable of giving you the praise you deserve, it’s just that (1) basically no one is writing literary fiction and (2) the present-day norms of literary fiction mean that the general reader will never like anyone who is. Both of these problems are easier to fix than drastically changing the reading tastes of the entire population. But how will they be fixed? I’m not sure.
I don’t think magazines with short stories are ever coming back. The situation in academia will likely not improve. But I do suspect Substack will play a role in broadening norms and making it easier to write literary fiction. I think the advent of the internet, though it killed the magazines, will someday be seen as a godsend for writing. Although on the topic of technology, if LLMs or AI have any part to play in this story, it will likely not be a good one. But knowing that the fate of literature is still in the hands of writers, I’m optimistic.
If I read correctly, the typical explantations for decline in readership, especially fiction, don’t suffice.
The author says it’s a supply side issue that effects the demand side. A few pipelines to producing great literary writers have gone away:
- The magazines all went bust, relative to their height. You can’t make a living writing short stories anymore and therefore less writers are going to print. They went to TV instead (Game of Thrones, Mad Men, etc.)
- The academic track is unrealistic. Thousands of PhD’s, ~100 tenure-track positions. More academics meant more writing in the magazines, meant more writers in the pipeline.
All of this influenced the editors and publishers. They believed there were less readers out there, so they optimized their books for other critics. Status was found in inward instead of outward (book sales).
The supply side argument is interesting to me which makes the Conclusion – basically no one is writing literary fiction and if writers and editors start publishing for readers instead of critics again then there’s hope! – an exciting opportunity.
Maybe it’s time to write that novel.
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Feeling cautiously optimistic about American democracy
A clear eyed commentary on the question of this authoritarian moment and the movement between Collapse and Resistance. Maybe we’re always in between those two, but this indicates the pendulum is swinging back to the middle.
A few excerpts:
Essentially, Trump seems to be governing like…a President in his second term. Typically, two-term Presidents try to change the country during their first four years, but in their second term they tend to mostly reign over the status quo. Trump’s allies and supporters clearly hoped that Trump’s second term would be very different, because of the Biden interregnum — that Trump would come back riding a wave of popular anger and essentially have two first terms. But Trump is ruling like someone who’s wary of being unpopular, and so he’s chickening out on his most extreme ideas.
And:
Democracy is working — the moderate, reasonable, freedom-loving country that you and I grew up in is rising up to protect itself.
And:
America is facing an authoritarian movement, but it’s one that’s turning out to be far more irresolute and incompetent than we had dared to hope a few months ago.
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Which Countries Won’t Exist in the 22nd Century?
From Tyler Cowen in the FP:
The biggest mistake we could make is to assume that political evolution is over, and that history represents ongoing directional progress toward ever more well-run nation-states. Port-au-Prince still has something to teach us in this regard.
I’ve been thinking about why it would be that the United States wouldn’t inevitably not collapse – mistakenly or intentionally – to some relative degree with the way things are going.
I have no reasonable thought as to why it wouldn’t. Tyler speaks to this well in this post.
The market is, I think, the best signal and right now the market is telling us that we have a high tolerance for letting Mr. Trump play god with our perceived and real grievances.
The response to the protests/riots in Los Angeles this week and the rhetoric out of the White House suggests we’re flirting with strict changes in the social contract (the Constitution, its reinforcing norms, and a fierce desire for Independence over Rule).
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The Gentle Singularity
Interesting post from Sam Altman on his blog after the release of o3 Pro yesterday.
Proclaiming that we’ve entered the intelligence takeoff is more than notable. As he rightly notes, being where we are would have sounded crazy just five years ago and might sound crazier than where we’ll be in 2030 based on where we are now.
A few parts that stuck out below.
I often hear people say wild things about how much water and energy is used by a single exchange with ChatGPT. It’s never passed the smell test for me. I may be off, but I have the impression of people saying things like, “a gallon of water every time you say ‘thank you’”. These have felt to me like copes from upper middle class progressives types looking to insert their climate-conscious-bona-fides. But, the numbers seem quite low:
(People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)
On jobs change:
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.
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Tyler Cowen and Mexican Art
I think this is a prime example of Tyler saying that he’s writing for the AIs. Thankfully it’s fascinating for me, the human, as well.
Part 1 here and part 2 here.
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Behind the Curtain: A white collar bloodbath
“Most human wins” continues to come to mind when I read these types of predictions. And this seems less a prediction coming from Dario.
Trying to become something like a ‘professional runner’ might end up being a very good option.