Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Can the Future Be Ad Free?

Creative marketing strategist Kodo Simone offers a provocative thought experiment: what if we banned advertising?

Creative marketing strategist Kodo Simone offers a provocative thought experiment: what if we banned advertising?

In the comment section, one contributor cites a 1934 quote from University of Chicago economist Henry Simons: “If present tendencies continue, we may soon reach a situation where most of our resources are utilized in persuading people to buy one thing rather than another, and only a minor fraction actually employed in creating things to be bought."

2. Will Smith Slapped Hard

Actor Will Smith has a new album inspired by the time he slappedChris Rock at the Oscars. Pitchfork is not impressed. Smith is “stilted on jokey opener ‘Int. Barbershop - Day,’ which begins, ‘Will Smith is cancelled,’ and proceeds to make you wish it was true, just so he would stop embarrassing himself.” There’s more:

The resulting music is excruciatingly corny, a cringe ringer of therapy platitudes, youth-pastor smarm, and showtune production that reeks of Hamilton. If the slap was Smith crashing out, Based on a True Story is him veering off a cliff while shouting, “I can fly!” Smith has always been a herb on wax, so some cheese is expected. At the peak of his musical powers, in the late ’90s, he was the emcee parents could understand, the universal chaperone to pizza parties and school dances.

3. Growth Story

Policymakers around the world are trying to reverse falling birthrates. They’re proposing tax incentives and savings schemes to induce couples to have more children. A reader on the substack Bet on It offers a different idea:

What would happen to fertility if couples started having children one year earlier? The total fertility rate (TFR) in the U.S. is currently 1.66. According to estimates of the relationship between age at first birth and completed fertility, we should expect something like a 3–5% increase in total fertility, with some studies suggesting even more. This translates to a rise in the TFR of about 0.05–0.10. That’s comparable to, or larger than, the effect of more expensive interventions like baby bonuses, tax incentives, or free childcare.

4. Fake Martin Wolf

When Martin Wolf, the dean of British economics columnists, writes a critical column, government ministers quiver. Now, there’s a deepfake of Wolf offering investment advice:

I have an alter ego or, as it is now known on the internet, an avatar. My avatar looks like me and sounds at least a bit like me. He pops up constantly on Facebook and Instagram. Colleagues who understand social media far better than I do have tried to kill this avatar. But so far at least they have failed. 

Why are we so determined to terminate this plausible-seeming version of myself? Because he is a fraud — a “deepfake”. Worse, he is also literally a fraud: he tries to get people to join an investment group that I am allegedly leading. Somebody has designed him to cheat people, by exploiting new technology, my name and reputation and that of the FT. He must die. But can we get him killed?

5. Banned Book Talk

Minutes before he went on stage, the U.S. Naval Academy canceled author Ryan Holiday’s speech to midshipmen. Organizers objected to Holiday’s criticism of the Department of Defense’s recent decision to remove 381 books from the Academy’s library. Holiday delivered the speech anyway – on YouTube. Deserves to be heard:

Reading is a superpower. Because when we are reading, we are not just conversing with the dead who created that book, but all the dead people who have read it since your predecessors—your ancestors who picked it up in a library, whose parents read it to them, who were recommended it by a friend whose lives were changed by the ideas in those books.

6. On-Demand Driving and Alzheimer’s Disease

Research finds that taxi drivers have an enlarged hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for spatial memory and navigation. Four Harvard researchers suspect this explains why just 1 percent of taxi and ambulance drivers died from Alzheimer’s disease, compared with nearly 4 percent of people across all occupations:

The very low incidence of Alzheimer’s disease did not manifest among drivers of other modes of transportation, which involve “fewer navigational demands.” Another brain-imaging study of long-time London bus drivers found that they do not have enlarged hippocampi. Scientists suspect that this is because “bus drivers are driving predetermined routes,” says [professor of healthcare policy Anupam] Jena. “It’s not this on-the-fly navigational memory that taxi drivers are required to possess.” He and his colleagues found that pilots and ship captains also exhibited typical rates of Alzheimer’s mortality.

Websites Worth Reading

The State of AI: McKinsey’s take

Google’s AI Robots: AI in the physical world 

Amazon’s Robots: AI in the physical world

Feeds We Follow

@awfulannouncing: Sporting commentary gets roasted

@cityaestheticss: What cities get right and wrong

@TheHubCanada: Canadian election watch