1. America Is Getting Weird
Robert Mariani has written a minor masterpiece describing “the weirding of America.” Drawing on his own dating experience, and traveling to traditional, small towns, Mariani discovers generational change is underway:
No single data point better illustrates the cultural movement of youth than this: 42 percent of Gen Z watches anime weekly (compared to 25 percent of Millennials), but only 25 percent of Gen Z follows NFL football (compared to 44 percent of Millennials). Anime has transformed from niche subculture to mainstream entertainment.
Americans are also staying put: “In 2023, only 7.8 percent of Americans changed residence — the lowest rate ever recorded since the Census began tracking mobility in 1948. Interstate moves, once a powerful homogenizing force, dwindled to just 1.4 percent of the population, about half of what it was twenty years ago.”
2. The Grid Gets Going
The spread of data centers has reinvigorated interest in electric power grids. Alex Chalmers’s history of the rise of a national grid in the United Kingdom – barely 100 years ago – reminds us that there’s precedent for the confusing nature of today’s competition:
The early market for electricity generation and distribution was chaotic. The first two decades of the 20th century saw UK local authorities and a grab bag of private companies locked in bitter and counterproductive competition with each other. Between 1900 and 1913, 224 new generation projects came online, at varying voltages, frequencies of supply, and using different kinds of current, and almost all using their own cables. In 1918 London, there were 50 different systems, ten different frequencies, and 24 voltages in operation.
3. A Bullish Case for Future Employment
In a series of long posts on X, tech optimist Marc Andreesen argues AI will not lead to an employment – or social – catastrophe. On economics, he insists that today’s alarmist arguments mirror those that “drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology.” Andreesen concludes by answering the question, What will be left for humans to do?
Even in a world where AGI can produce every good and service at near-zero cost, humans will still want things that are irreducibly scarce: other humans’ time and attention. A massage from another human. A meal cooked with love by a person who cares. A conversation with someone who genuinely listens. Live performance. Mentorship. Friendship. Community. Spiritual guidance. Teaching that is responsive to a specific child’s specific needs in real time. These things cannot be AGI-produced without losing the very quality that makes them valuable, because the value is constituted by the human origin.
4. The Blind Side
Howard Yu wonders whether companies replacing employees with AI are repeating an old error: trusting incomplete internal data. Blockbuster is one of four examples:
By the mid-1990s, Blockbuster had accumulated more data on the movie-viewing habits of Americans than any company in history. Every rental, every customer’s age, address, gender. Hundreds of millions of transactions. Its CEOs loved to boast about this massive database. But boasting was the only thing they ever did with it. Catalog movies — the Drama, Comedy, Action, and Horror sections that filled at least half of every store — were essentially untracked. Blockbuster had no way to see how often those movies were rented.
5. The Apple Car that Never Was
During a podcast about his new history of Apple, David Pogue discusses the company’s efforts to build a car. It was probably Apple’s most expensive failure:
Project Titan. Yeah. They spent 10 years on it, $10 billion. They hired 1,200 engineers from Tesla and BMW and Ford. And the idea was going to be this luxurious living room on wheels. Johnny Ive designed it. Yeah. And it was going to be this white – there was no forward and no backward end to it. No steering wheel, no pedals. Yeah. It was four luxurious recliners inside facing each other that you’d sit in. It had the most incredible sound system. They experimented with making the windows augmented reality so it would identify the storefront you’re looking at or the street name. And they just never got there. They had like thousands of patents. They made huge breakthroughs in batteries and lighting and so on. But they – still no one has come up with a 100 percent self-driving car to this day.
6. Chat GPT Bites Man, Saves Dog
In a now-viral story, a data analyst in Australia used ChatGPT to treat a tumor on his dog’s leg. He worked with university labs to design a fully personalized mRNA cancer vaccine. Then came the bureaucratic hurdles:
One guy, a rescue dog, and a $20/month ChatGPT subscription just produced a proof of concept that the pharmaceutical industry has spent a decade and billions of dollars building toward. The vaccine worked. The tumor shrank. And the only reason it happened is because a dog owner loved his dog enough to spend three months fighting paperwork.
Websites Worth Reading
Big Elephant Tusks: Photos by Johan Siggesson
The Jaws Dolly Zoom: Design your own shot
American Competitiveness at 250: McKinsey Global Institute’s report
Feeds We Follow
@chamath: Will AI destroy long-term value
@archeohistories: The German coffee crisis
@woofknight: Paraprosdokians