Category: Uncategorized

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Easy to bioengineer a very dangerous virus?

2. The astrophysicists are getting antsy too.  Princeton is also getting nervous.  If nothing else, these are huge PR own goals.  The guy is a Mill scholars, can you imagine J.S. Mill tweeting that way?

3. New David Brooks podcast.

4. One Chinese view of AI risk.  And from Richard Hanania.

5. Arnold Kling on Polanyi knowledge.

6. Jeremy Stern profile of Mark Zuckerberg.  Great piece.

7. China’s first AI-generated TV series.

8. Introducing Free Press Excursions.

9. Redux of my earlier talk/session at St. Andrews on Effective Altruism as a philosophy.

Those new service sector jobs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Horwitz is in the business of playing a version of mom for local college students. Concierge companies offering student support have existed for decades. But in recent years, a new crop of upstarts — such as Horwitz’s company, MindyKnows; the Bama Mama in Alabama; the GA Mom in Georgia; and Campus Mom in Texas — have met additional demand from a new generation of worried parents…

The specific services vary here and there, but share commonalities. Campus Mom offers “holistic wellness check-ins,” laundry services and sorority recruitment support packages, sent to the sisters to up a child’s odds of acceptance. Carrie Eckhardt, the Bama Mama, will clean students’ dorm rooms and check in if parents haven’t heard from their child in a few days (“just pop in and say hi, and take a picture and send it to their mom”)…

Horwitz, for her part, brings students balloons on their birthdays and chicken soup when they’re sick, sits with them in the emergency room and picks up their prescriptions if they’re busy. She bakes homemade challah, coordinates with the bedbug exterminator, texts photos and updates to faraway parents and doles out recommendations on the best local doctors and landlords.

Here is more from Kristy Alpert at the NYT.

Monday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Will driverless cars increase or reduce urban density?

2. One decomposition approach to why interest rates have been going up.

3. New Guinness record holders.

4. Is there any chance of finding Rembrandt DNA?

5. “Abundance Corps is hosting Making Progress, a private gathering for students interested in how science, technology, and institutions can improve people’s lives.”

6. High school students plus AI solve math problem.

7. “China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.” (NYT)

8. Good data: cybersecurity stocks surged today.

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Scott Sumner as regional thinker.

2. The economists who work on “Productivity and Innovation” are most likely to use AI for their writing.

3. Michael Levin defends neo-neo-Platonism?

4. Look for and try to limit agent collusion.

5. Do orangutans like Indian classical music?

6. “Our results demonstrate that LLM-evolved constitutions significantly outperform both human-designed principles and one-shot LLM-generated rules for multi-agent coordination.“

A simple model of AI-aided economic growth

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Solow model has its uses, but it fails when it comes to major changes stemming from AI.  Consider instead an economy with (at least) two factors of production:

1. Intelligence.  Yes, formal smarts.  Playing chess, proving math theorems, and doing well on evals.  Don’t forget humans can do those things too, though AIs are now a huge boost here.

2. Polanyi knowledge.  Michael Polanyi, that is.  This refers to knowledge of time and place, inarticulable knowledge, custom and habit, and many other particularities that you can read about in Hayek and Polanyi and in many other social scientists, anthropologists too.

Humans specialize in this.  The AIs can aid in its production, but at least so far there is no way you can “bring an AI into your office and have it figure out how that office works.”  At least not in the human rather than the purely mechanistic sense.

In the model, intelligence and Polanyi knowledge combine to produce output.

Substitutability is fairly limited.  For instance, if you have problems of norms in your office, a mere dose of AI-drenched technocratic knowledge does not usually solve those problems.  Sometimes it even can make those problems worse, by empowering rent-seekers further.

Intelligence and Polanyi knowledge are not quite Leontief complements, but they are mostly complements.

Now recently the U.S. economy has experienced a huge positive shock to its Intelligence, with more to come.

The core prediction is that this increases marginal returns, employment, and real wages in the Polanyi knowledge sector.  All of a sudden, the inputs into that sector are relatively scarce, compared to the now-larger quantity of Intelligence.

There will also be some transitional unemployment in the Intelligence sector, at least once Centaur models fade.  But so far Centaur models are holding, for instance mathematicians did the prompting to do the new math work.  Nonetheless some of these Centaur employments will fade, just as they have in chess.

Note that the Polanyi sector cannot be boosted very quickly or with direct and simple efficacy.  It is messy by its nature, to cite a term from Luis Garicano.  So the wage and employment gains there are slow in coming.  But they keep on coming for a long period of time.  There are further AI/Intelligence advances on tap, plus absorbing the advances to date, and exploiting them, takes a long time.

In this model, if someone or something could “commandeer” the Intelligence sector, their power over society would be much more limited than it might appear at first.  The world does not change that much at first, because the necessary complements are lacking.

The Solow model usually does fine by ignoring these features of the world, in part because it is rare for the Intelligence sector to take such a rapid swing upwards.  So the ratios and complementarities across these two sectors usually are fairly constant in the short run, though not in 2026 or in the next years to come.

I recall talking through this model, and debating it with people, when I was seventeen years old.  The impetus for that was the Soviet preoccupation with cybernetics, central planning, and possible supercomputers.  We were all wondering what kinds of economic improvements that might lead to, or whether it could make central planning successful (no, basically, but that involves some yet further arguments).

Of course this very simple model can be improved upon in many ways, but it is a start.

This very simple model so far is matching up to the data, namely that we have shocking AI and tech advances, the job market is doing fine, markets do not see high risk, and economic growth is robust, not exploding, but likely will rise in the future.  These predictions change somewhat as the Polanyi sector, slowly, catches up to and incorporates the Intelligence explosion.

In the meantime, this is the best basic framework for understanding our current situation.

The mathematicians rebel against AI

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the statement, signed by Terry Tao among many other math notables, most of you probably have read it by now.  I do not accept the most cynical interpretations of this proclamation.  Some of you for instance may recall that I made and indeed stressed a similar point in the last chapter of my recent “generative book” on marginalism.  In some near future, perhaps fewer economists will carry around marginalist insights and modes of thought in their heads, since you can just get the right answer by pressing the proverbial button on the AI.

I find this future disturbing, and not altogether pleasant for me personally, given how much personal status I have wrapped up in particular modes of economic thought.  Yet I also know the Bastiat distinction between the seen and the unseen, and I expect the benefits to economic science from AI will be enormous, even if current practitioners cannot foresee most of those benefits today.

I do very much differ with at least one part of the mathematicians’ proclamation.  They write: “…whether these changes ultimately benefit the field or have a destructive effect will in large part be determined by the decisions of the humans in control of this new technology.”  There is no actual argument for that proposition, and I would sooner expect that the main “action variable” is how well the mathematicians adapt to the new reality.  For instance there is nothing stopping the mathematics community from awarding status, pay, and promotions to people who “fill in the important blanks in math understanding,” even if an AI already has proven or disproven the underlying theorems.  If that kind of work is so important, we still can do it and reward it professionally.  In the meantime, I expect the funding for mathematics, and the interest in the topic, to rise considerably, at least in the medium term.  All of a sudden, math matters much more than it used to, all the more so if P vs. NP happens to go the wrong way, or if the distribution of the primes turns out to be a little too predictable.

The mathematicians may not in every way enjoy being the subordinates or handmaidens of the AIs, but that is a change in status they simply will have to get used to, just as I realize AIs someday will end up as better column and blog writers than I am.  I do not look to the companies — which I fully expect to “act like companies” — to somehow manage, moderate, or assuage that pending trend.  It really is up to me to parlay my current intellectual portfolio into new, more AI-compatible intellectual and yes also marketing approaches.  I’ve been given plenty of “legs up” along the way already, as is true for the Fields Medal winners as well, and it is up to me to figure out how to contribute in the future.

Might someone not invent/discover/prompt a way to use AIs to produce, articulate, and teach “more mathematical understanding” along the way?  I get that solving famous dramatic math problems is the current commercial priority of the major AI companies.  But as the AI space grows, these other paths hardly seem unlikely to me, and in fact the human mathematicians are the ones who can do the most to lead the way along those dimensions.

In this regard the current manifestation of complaints seems oddly early.  “I didn’t like the first week or two of your intellectual revolution” is an accurate, and perhaps better reframed way of putting it.  At which point perhaps a bit of patience is needed before anything else?  These days, we all have more mathematical resources at our disposal, and so a bit of celebration is in order as well.

The Allocative Cost of War

by  Tyler Cowen

Why is war so economically costly? Our answer is that modern war lowers output not only by destroying productive factors, but also by making the surviving economy work less efficiently. Using uniquely comprehensive firm-level data collected during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we document a dramatic collapse in allocative productivity in Ukraine. To sharpen identification and explore key mechanisms (including the role of war intensity, internal displacement, reallocation, and macroeconomic instability), we exploit spatial heterogeneity across Ukrainian districts and comparisons with Russian aggression in 2014 and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Our key policy implication is that restoring allocative efficiency–and preparing institutional arrangements that facilitate rapid reallocation in times of stress–is critical for sustaining economic capacity, defense, and national security.

That is from a new working paper by Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Marvin Amann, and Oleksandr Talavera.

Is there now a better trend in youth mental health?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A key U.S. government report on mental health, substance use and addiction showed continued improvements in several metrics, especially among young people.

There was some uncertainty about the future of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health last year, when the entire 17-member team responsible for it was laid off by the Trump administration. But the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released the latest report Monday, with data that lets researchers look at trends from 2021 to 2025.

Fewer adolescents aged 12 to 17 reported using tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and binge drinking in the previous month, the survey found.

And in the past year, fewer in that age group reported:

— illicit drug and marijuana use

— starting drinking alcohol, vaping or marijuana

— substance, alcohol or drug use disorders

Adolescents also saw declining trends for major depressive episodes and fewer reported serious thoughts of suicide, making a suicide plan and attempting suicide.

Here is the link, via Chris Ferguson.

My short interview with Julia Willemyns

by  Tyler Cowen

Here is the link, here is the end bit:

Who is the most important thinker of our time?

It’s not about individual thinkers any more. It’s about the internet as this vast organ of knowledge that you can play like a musical instrument, and combining the internet with AI. You can figure out things to an unprecedented degree, and it’s great in a way how much we’ve removed that process from any individual thinker.

What’s your favourite podcast?

My own! It would be weird if it wasn’t, right?

Fun throughout, from the Centre for British Progress.

My very interesting Conversation with Jared Diamond

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

So which leaders do make a difference?  

Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana’s success will endure, Jared’s own place in intellectual history, and what he’d tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he’s more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he’d do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur “genius grant” left him depressed for a week, why he’s listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more. 

Excerpt, we start with this:

COWEN: Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?

DIAMOND: Wow. Wow. The least replaceable leader in human history. Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ, but there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time discussed in the New Testament. If Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. I would say that in the long run, there is no leader that has made a difference.

COWEN: Well, you say “might have taken over,” but that’s probabilistic, right? Say with a 40 percent chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.

DIAMOND: Certainly, his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself was the charismatic founder, but a religion needs three things: It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was St. Paul. In the case of the Mahdi’s religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general. In the case of Islam, Muhammad was the founder and the organizer and the general. Religions may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.

COWEN: Without the figure of Muhammad at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic? In some ways, maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns. Thus, Muhammad is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever.

DIAMOND: That’s possible. That’s a big question. It’s harder to become clear about Muhammad than it is about Christ, because we don’t know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies and for feeding an army. We just don’t have information on the weather in Arabia at that time.

A counter-example is Genghis Khan, who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Recently, why did Genghis Khan do it when there were other steppe leaders like Adolf Hühnlein and Timur the Turk? We’ve learned recently that the wettest time on the steppes in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis’s birth. He was born at exactly the right time at the right place. If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn’t know anything about him. In the case of Muhammad, we just don’t know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.

COWEN: The very notion that the two first names we’re talking about, they’re both religious leaders, right? They’re not kings. They’re not inventors. Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it’s ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?

Interesting throughout, and we debated pomegranate juice as well.  I enjoyed reading Jared’s new book Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter?

What should I ask Kevin Roose?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a podcast with him.  From Wikipedia:

Kevin Roose…is an American author and journalist. He is the author of three books, and is a technology columnist and podcast host for The New York Times. He wrote a book about Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university known for strict rules imposed on students…

Kevin of course has a new book coming out, namely The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence.  I have yet to read it, but I expect it to be gripping.

So what should I ask him?