BRIEFLY NOTED: 2023-07-05 We
LSMLGPTs are not þe singularity; 20,000 SubStack subscribers!; Jean Tirole on spheres of activity & selves; & Palmer on greedy right-wing nutcases, Posen on Britain's need for structural reform...
…Chen & Ma on China’s economic history, & Mercantante on the causal thinness of our escape from Nazi HellWorld…
MUST-READ: Large-Scale Machine-Learning Technologies Will Change þe World, But Not Make It Unimaginably Different:
It is easy to get vastly overexcited about potentials of new Large-Scale Machine-Learning General-Purpose Technologies. To get income-per-capita growth in the U.S. up from 1%/year to 4%/year would require, every year, that new technologies enable us to take everything done by 3% of our workers, and have machines do it for free. And do that again next year. And again. For that you need both rapid technological change in leading sectors and extremely high elasticity of demand—like for textiles back in the day, or iron and steel, or non-human power. LSMLGPTs that replace workers can’t do that. And what experiences could LSMLGPTs create that would allow for enormous extension because of high elasticity of demand?
I don’t see any.
Well, maybe there are AR uses for allowing us to grok the world around us and allowing us to see media new and new media, a la Apple’s forthcoming VisionOS and its Vision Pro headset, that could do the job. And if the path to that outcome becomes clear, I will change my mind on this. After all, Apple Computer’s equity value is now more than 11% of annual U.S. GDP:
Arjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang: Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve: ‘The trend growth rate of GDP per capita in the world's frontier economy has never exceeded three percent per year…. We think AI can be “transformative” in the same way the internet was, raising productivity and changing habits. But many daunting hurdles lie on the way to the accelerating growth rates predicted by some…. Baumol… productivity growth… constrained by the weakest sector…. Progress in fine motor control has hugely lagged… “the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard.”… Insofar as AI development requires human input, humans will constrain productivity…. We may be far from the critical path… claiming that the first monkey that climbed a tree was making progress towards landing on the moon….. AI may even decrease productivity… “GPT-4 is a godsend for a NIMBY facing a planning application.”… OpenAI [says]… over 80% of workers would have less than 50% of their tasks affected…
ONE IMAGE: Breaking þe 20,000 Subscribers Barrier:
ONE VIDEO: Jean Tirole: Public & Private Spheres, & þe Authentic Self:
Very Briefly Noted:
Kevin M. Levin: “The Fourth of July is the First Great Fact in Your Nation’s History”: ‘David Blight… “First movement, he sets them at ease by honoring the Founding Fathers…. That middle movement…. Be warned…. And then he ends…. Your nation is still young…. You might yet have a chance to save yourselves…
Qianer Liu & al.: Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans: ‘Initial hopes of 1 million shipments in 2024 dashed by manufacturing problems…. Among the major hurdles… is the manufacturing of the… two micro-OLED displays—one per eye...
Duncan Black: Not Going To Read It: ‘Once you refashion public accommodation requirements into "free speech" issues, they can all be chucked out the window…. Forcing me to file disclosure forms with the SEC? COMPELLING SPEECH! UNCONSTITUTIONAL…
Jonathan Levy: The Localist: ‘Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism [by] Glory M. Liu…. One puzzle in the intellectual history of the twentieth century is why the University of Chicago became the leading bastion of free market economics…. There is only Das Adam Smith Problem if one demands that a single thinker’s thoughts must comprise a single systematic whole free of contradictions…
Duncan Black: America's Worst Supreme Court Justice: Neil Gorsuch: ‘And of course the NYT did what they do for every Republican nominee: “Gorsuch Not Easy to Pigeonhole on Gay Rights, Friends Say”. He has gay friends! He didn't punch them in their faces when he found out!…
Chance Miller: Twitter tells users to touch grass, adds new rule limiting how many tweets you can read per day: ‘For millions of Twitter users, the ability to read tweets will break at some point today. Those Twitter users, however, will not be able to see Elon’s announcement…because new tweets won’t load after you hit that limit…
Graham Ruddick: Build It and They Will Come: ‘Birmingham, Manchester and other UK cities cannot effectively access large labour markets…. In Manchester the average person can reach 12.5 times as many jobs by car as they can by public transport within half-an-hour. Bristol is not far behind Manchester. But for London it’s just 2 times, better than all other big cities…
Ole Peters (2019): The ergodicity problem in economics: ‘Prevailing formulations of economic theory… make an indiscriminate assumption of ergodicity…. I argue that by carefully addressing the question of ergodicity, many puzzles besetting the current economic formalism are resolved in a natural and empirically testable way…
Ole Peters & Alexander Adamou (2020): Leverage efficiency: ‘Optimal leverage… maximizes the time-average growth rate of an investment…. It was hypothesized that this optimal leverage is attracted to 1…
David Updegraff: ‘Insofar as we cannot bring ourselves to get the negative externalities priced into the 'market' (eg. carbon tax, social/environmental side effects..), I suppose ESG is 2nd best. Though maybe not; if Exxon pays more for capital does that mean a dirtier or cleaner result? Those devilish details...
¶s:
When you start out with zero, it is very hard to convince people that you deserve all three. I think the conservative judicial machine should pick one, and realize that if they pick more than one they are risking a huge backlash:
James Palmer: ‘The conservative justices want to be able to push their agenda *and* demand respect as great and impartial legal minds *and* take large bribes from the rich. They should be treated with total disrespect in every social and political context imaginable. Americans are a surprisingly obsequious people when it comes to the trappings of office and the more that changes the better…
The Tory Party is incapable of doing anything other than blocking Britain’s needed structural reforms. But Adam Posen begs. For what he begs, I am not sure. Perhaps for the City of London to do what it did to Truss and Kwarteng last fall, and form itself into a private-sector pickup IMF to bring down the hammer?:
Adam Posen: It is time for the UK to think like an emerging market: ‘For the situation to improve, policymakers must act as if they are under a stabilisation programme…. Unlike the largest economies, there is now less room for policy error, and fewer good choices…. Hence the need to put a solid floor under the situation, forestalling further descent. A co-ordinated programme… does require a multiyear plan, the redistribution of economic burdens…. Some false debates should be put aside. Brexit did not cause all of the UK’s economic problems, but it made almost all of them worse…. First, a major reallocation of fiscal priorities…. Yes, all this will be dismissed as completely politically impossible. A country with five governments in seven years, let alone one facing a general election, is unlikely to sustain such commitments. Yet, that is exactly what small unstable economies face when they get into IMF programmes. Such commitments are what restores credibility. The UK has the luxury of doing this on its own terms, when things are merely miserable but not an outright crisis…. Second… force any restructuring of mortgages to come out of the private sector lenders…. Third, pursue the long talked about planning reforms to spark a boom in construction…. Fourth, actually carry through the obvious labour supply reforms to address the clear mismatch between available workers and jobs…. Fifth, lean in to being a global Britain post-Brexit. Think like a small country and specialise… more of the pro-immigration policy which has been the one major source of growth of late, and double-down on attracting foreign students…. Finally, monetary policy has to tighten quite a bit more…
When I finish reading these, I will know so much more!:
Zhiwu Chen & Chicheng Ma: Quantitative history studies on China: State capacity, institutions, culture and human capital from prehistoric times to the present: ‘Volumes of historical archives in China have been digitised, from which various datasets have been constructed for scholarly inquiry. Furthermore, the excavation of thousands of archaeological sites provided detailed data about prehistoric development across China's landmass. As a result, there has been remarkable progress in quantitative studies on China's past. This article reviews recent work in five theme areas to provide a background for the papers included in this special issue. These themes include state formation, Confucianism, human capital, Christian missionaries, and long-term persistence studies. The five papers in this issue fall into these themes and are introduced where appropriate…
Whether the Nazis had lost WWII by December 10, 1941, or whether it still hung in the balance in late 1942 is a very hard question. My view is that they would have needed both operational victories in the Caucasus-Volga campaign, and technical-operational victories so as not to lose the Battle of the Atlantic in early 1943 in order to have stood a chance:
Steven Mercatante: Why Germany Nearly Won WWII: ‘The premature drive into the Caucasus…. Breaking up… 11th Army…. Armored assets [left] in France…. Failure to commit reserves during… assaults on Stalingrad… detachment of… 16th Motorized from… drive on Ordzhonikidze…. Failure to… bolster… 6th Army’s flanks…. Failure to allow Paulus to immediately break out…. Now, given the previous decision making made by Hitler, the OKH, and lower-ranked commanders, it is certainly understandable that many of these mistakes were made, but what is most stunning is that all… were…. [If not] events in southern Russia may have unfolded very differently in 1942 (4 words)—with potentially dramatic outcomes for a Third Reich that came horrifyingly close to securing its long-term existence…
Yes indeed. I need one, badly, fuck with Dunbar's law and such…
I do not know whether I take it seriously. It requires (1) Russian collapse and (2) American decision that suppressing Naziism is not worth the cost. And since the cost to a country with an atomic weapons monopoly is not that high, I see Nazi victory in the Caucasus-Volga and in the Battle of the Atlantic followed by the transformation of Germany into a lake of radioactive glass