BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-02 Fr

Willis lands a good one on the "AI" moral panic; Nadella all-in on a no quite ready for prime-time mass-market technology; AWWK!! ARKK; Wells's "Witch King", Levine on blindsided banks, Deese on...

Jun 02, 2023

MUST-READ: Moral Panic & “AI”:

Incredibly stupid misinformation without the assistance of “AI”: Colin Powell on Iraq in 2003:

Oliver Willis lands a good one:

Oliver Willis: A.I., TikTok And The Moral Panic Trap: ‘We're Already Dumb, We Don't Need Robots To Help…. It wasn’t an A.I. chatbot that convinced millions of people that President Barack Obama was a Kenyan socialist secret agent. It wasn’t a deepfake that led millions to believe there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — and who continued to push that myth years after the WMD threat had been debunked. It wasn’t a viral TikTok meme that got millions of voters convinced that Bill and Hillary Clinton were an elite pair of assassins, taking out everyone who stood in their way. We were already very dumb, collectively, before the current era of technological marvels and we’re always going to have a base level of stupidity. Especially in politics. That doesn’t mean these new things aren’t concerning…. But my gut feeling is that our desire to legislate in response to these kinds of threats… is ultimately overblown fearmongering…

My view is that we should do anything and everything to throw sand into the gears of the advertising-outrage-clickbait machine, as it is a massive accelerant f disinformation. That is what makes me a big supporter of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency privacy initiative, and a big booster always and everywhere non-advertising based information-economy business models. But more ideas are very welcome.

ONE VIDEO: Microsoft Build Keynote:

Edgy and risky: this technology is really not ready for mass-market prime time yet…

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

ONE IMAGE:

This ain’t alpha. This ain’t even beta. -10% nominal capital gain plus 3% cumulative dividends over the past five years, minus 16% cumulative inflation—a -23% cumulative real return over the past five years, compared to a 68% real return on the S&P500.

Very Briefly Noted:

Sean O’Connell: ‘SpiderMan: Across The SpiderVerse lives one step above Masterpiece. It's an actual work of art. Every frame deserves to be hung in a museum. The jokes and nods to Spidey lore are perfect. It's OUTSTANDING. The best #SpiderMan movie. Might be my favorite movie ever. Cherish it…
Robin Wigglesworth: Investors are so horny for AI that they’ve invested $175mn in OpenAI’s VC fund: ‘Summer of Sam Altman…
Monticello: Joseph Fossett: ‘The son of Mary Hemings Bell, the eldest daughter of Elizabeth Hemings. He was a skilled blacksmith "who could do any thing it was necessary to do with steel or iron," remembered Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon…. When [Thomas] Bell purchased Mary Hemings and his two children by her in 1792, twelve-year-old Fossett and his nine-year old sister Betsey were separated from their mother and returned to Monticello because Jefferson would not sell them…
Scott Lemieux: Alito: the Clean Water Act did not authorize the EPA to protect the bodies of water its text was specifically amended to protect…
Azeem Azhar: Solar Saves Us: ‘The sun is rising on net zero: Solar deployments and battery manufacturing are growing much faster than expected, and it’s looking like paired together, they could help us achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050…
Jon Chait: ‘I wrote that the ethical problem with Harlan Crow’s patronage of Clarence Thomas is that Thomas has put his living standard at risk should he ever do anything to significantly displease Crow…. National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, to whom I was responding, has published a retort so ludicrous I had to read it several times to be sure I was not misunderstanding it…
Ethan Mollick: What happens when AI reads a book: ‘if you are a very good writer or editor, you are better than current AI (though you can still benefit from AI help in many areas). If you are only okay at particular tasks, perhaps AI might outperform you. As AI technology advances, a lot depends on whether skilled humans continue to do better than the best AIs…
Dan Davies (2010): ‘There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of “giving known liars the benefit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world…
Brian Tyler Cohen: ‘Kevin McCarthy announces a “commission” to “look at” cutting Social Security and Medicare: “I’m going to make some people uncomfortable.” He attacked Biden for “walling off” cuts to Social Security and Medicare during debt ceiling negotiations…
Edward Luce: Game, set and almost match to Biden on the debt ceiling: ‘Republican drama barely dents US president’s agenda…

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¶s:

Sia: Intimate Majesty: Witch King by Martha Wells: ‘The book opens with Kai and the absolutely amazing Zeide confused and angry and somewhat scared… but endlessly determined, and maybe even more importantly, capable. They are world-wise and street-smart and they know – they know – exactly what they are capable of, and that there is nothing the world can throw at them that they cannot handle: “I’m starting to think that a mortal Prince-heir who wanted to consort with a demon in human form may not be a completely trustworthy person.” Is it obvious that I adore them??? And then we switch to the older timeline…
Matt Levine: The Deposit Franchise: ‘The basic question about this year’s US regional banking crisis is “why weren’t the banks prepared for the very predictable problems that they faced when interest rates went up,” and the basic answer is “because they thought rates going up would be good for them.”… Theory 2, bank deposits are actually long-term, because the banks have enduring relationships with their customers…. Banks can use those long-term-ish deposits to fund long-term assets, and as interest rates go up, the banks can earn higher rates, don’t have to pay higher rates, and so make more money. Rising rates are good. Theory 2 is the traditional theory of banking, and it is why many banks were not adequately prepared for rising rates….
Brian Deese: The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring: ‘Congress and the Biden administration have more work to do.
First, lawmakers must make it easier to build clean energy infrastructure…. Second… Congress could develop an industrial competitiveness program for heavy industries like cement, steel and chemicals that includes an emissions-based border adjustment fee…. Third, we need to work with allies across developed and emerging markets to build a cooperative international framework around the I.R.A.’s investment incentives…. Fourth, policymakers and the public need better tools to close the gap between splashy corporate clean energy announcements and speculative long-term projections to understand where investments are being made and what they are achieving…
Tim Bradshaw & Richard Waters: How Nvidia created the chip powering the generative AI boom: ‘High demand for US group’s H100 processors helps send its market value skyrocketing towards $1tn…. The H100… costing about $40,000 each…. In November, ChatGPT was launched. “We went from a pretty tough year last year to an overnight turnround,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive…. Nvidia announced on Wednesday that its sales for the three months ending in July would be $11bn, more than 50 per cent ahead of Wall Street’s previous estimates, driven by a revival in data centre spending by Big Tech and demand for its AI chips. Investors’ response to the forecast added $184bn to Nvidia’s market capitalisation in a single day…. Huang’s confidence on continued gains stems in part from being able to work with chip manufacturer TSMC to scale up H100 production to satisfy exploding demand…
Alexander Sammon: Want to Stare Into the Republican Soul in 2023?: ‘At a party filled with booze and grievance, some of the party’s richest patrons looked to the future. Not everyone liked what they saw…. Car dealers, gas station owners, and building contractors… make up the majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year…. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz found that over 20 percent of car dealerships in the U.S. have an owner banking more than $1.5 million per year…. You can’t understand U.S. conservatism without understanding the car dealer—that middlemensch of American capitalism, selling a product he doesn’t make at a fat-enough markup to become fabulously rich and politically powerful…. Although dealers are maligned as parasites, their relationship to the GOP is pure symbiosis: Republicans need their money and networks, and dealers need politicians to protect them from repealing the laws that keep the money coming in…. Teslas made in Texas have to be shipped out of the state and then reimported across state lines to any buyers in Texas who purchase them online, one of many ridiculous workarounds born of dealer-protection laws…. Greg Gutfeld… current aw-shucks libertarian everyman of Fox News…. “Cars are fun. If you wanna live in a padded cell, if you wanna drive your Prius, that’s great. I am all for gas, lots of gas!” Gutfeld couldn’t even finish his sentence over the riotous applause that broke out. He started in on a different joke, then abandoned it midway through to go back to the well. “Nobody is going to be able to confiscate your gas-powered car, because what’s gonna tow it?!” The audience roared. “I have not seen an e–tow truck to save my life!”…