Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1.  Will AI Exterminate Humanity?

The most important – and scariest – essay of the month comes from Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei. It is certain to be quoted and reposted everywhere. Amodei considers, at length, the many negative scenarios where AI machines become bad actors that threaten society:

AI models could develop personalities during training that are (or if they occurred in humans would be described as) psychotic, paranoid, violent, or unstable, and act out, which for very powerful or capable systems could involve exterminating humanity. None of these are power-seeking, exactly; they’re just weird psychological states an AI could get into that entail coherent, destructive behavior.

Even still, Amodei is not panicked. His advice is to wait and see: “The most constructive thing we can do today is advocate for limited rules while we learn whether or not there is evidence to support stronger ones.”

2. Whiners

Ten years ago, a widely cited study found that most complaints about airport noise came from a small handful of people. Alex Tabarrok discovered that the problem has gotten worse:

In 2024 one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.) 

 Airports aren’t alone. According to Tabarrok, “Increasingly, public institutions seem to exist to manage the obsessions of a tiny number of neurotic—and possibly malicious—complainers.”

3. Keep on Scrolling on

Good news, TikTok! A new study blows a hole through the popular theory that social media is to blame for teenage angst. Researchers followed 25,000 11-to-14-year-olds over three school years, tracking their self-reported social media and gaming habits along with their emotional difficulties. The Guardian reviews the findings:

The study found no evidence for boys or girls that heavier social media use or more frequent gaming increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression over the following year...Increases in girls’ and boys’ social media use from year 8 to year 9 and from year 9 to year 10 had zero detrimental impact on their mental health the following year, the authors found. More time spent gaming also had a zero negative effect on pupils’ mental health. 

4. Don’t Bet on It

Jasper Craven squeezes all the competitive excitement out of online sports betting. His Harper’s article makes a data-based, hard-to-refute case that the combination of apps, Vegas, and the NFL has become what opioid use was just a few years ago – an addictive social force spinning out of control:

Nearly half of all American men aged eighteen to forty-nine maintain an online sports-betting account, a statistic surely buttressed by a multibillion-dollar advertising blitz. Emerging research suggests that the spread of sports gambling portends a huge increase in gambling addiction, which has the highest rate of suicide of any addictive behavior.

5. Seen at CES

Every year, Steve Sinofsky – veteran Microsoft leader, venture capitalist, and one of the godfathers of Silicon Valley – goes to the Consumer Electronic Show and files a long report about what is going on in tech. This year’s dispatch doesn’t disappoint. It covers everything from the Nvidia booth to home health. His observation about AI recalls the old days of software:

As I walked the floor at every corner I was blown away by the companies with specific AI enabled scenarios solving actual problems in what might seem like narrow domains requiring domain knowledge to even approach the work. A few readers might know, but the original software market included highly specific software for farming, medical offices, construction, and real estate management (check out an early RadioShack catalog here). The sign that something is a new platform is seeing all the above reimagined or done for the first time with the new tools.

6. Leaving on a (Private) Jet Plane

There is much speculation about the impact that California’s proposed billionaire tax might have on the state’s wealthiest people. Mike Solano of Pirate Wires called many of them to ask. The result is not hard to guess:

I’ve spoken with around ten percent of billionaires in the state myself. Of the 21 men I interviewed, 20 would have been impacted by the ballot measure. All 20 of them, including the Democrats, as well as several of the most committed diehard proponents of revitalizing San Francisco, are now developing an exit plan. (Three have already left.)

Websites Worth Reading

The Power Brokers: Long history of famed venture firm Andreesen Horowitz

Archive of Italian Design: Photos and notes

100 Years of Television: How It Started

Feeds We Follow

@MichaelAArouet: Investing with charts

@AlinejadMasih: Courageous Iranian journalist and activist