Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday assorted links
2. Guatemala update.
3. Tech-utopian project coming in Uruguay?
5. Do stock buybacks bring harm?
6. How AI competition works in China.
7. Economist column on AI risk and shorting the market (hint: ask the AGI what to do! And of course asset prices fall along the way).
The economics of late grandmotherhood
We show how fertility delays compound across generations to raise age at first grandmotherhood. Under the 1960 first-birth schedule median grandmotherhood came at 44. Under the 2024 schedule it is 57, cutting the healthy years with grandchildren from 28 to 15. Longer life does not make up the loss of years when the grandmother is healthy enough to supply money and care. Delay is most pronounced among the college-educated, with reproductive-control access accounting for over half the fall in grandmotherhood by age 55 among White college graduates. When a daughter times her first birth to maximize her own payoff, the loss her choice imposes on her mother is external to her calculation. We call this the Rotten Adult Kid Problem. Delay raises both the price of a grandmother’s care and wealth per grandchild.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Dora Costa and Matt Kahn.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Designing a FINRA for frontier AI.
2. Andrew Ng.
3. Some semi-skeptical notes on stablecoins, based on economic history.
4. Global views on fairness and redistribution.
5. Essays on whether AI will make management more valuable.
6. The real authorities on the California billionaire wealth tax. They are right in front of your eyes.
7. “The storied venture-capital firm is investing $35 million in an unaccredited San Francisco-based two-year alternative to traditional college for students ages 16 to 22. Though named the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, the school will operate as an independent business led by Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the ed-tech platform Udemy.” (WSJ)
Dartmouth Provost okie-dokie
On Aug. 26, a Semafor investigation using Pangram to determine whether recent guest columns in major newspapers were written using artificial intelligence identified a column by Schnell as “100% AI-written.” Schnell’s column in The Washington Post — titled “Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem.” — argued that “a degree should distinguish what students can do independently from what they can accomplish with AI.
”The Dartmouth subsequently reviewed publications written by Schnell before and after the November 2022 public release of ChatGPT. Pangram 4.0, the latest publicly available version of the AI detector, labeled all of Schnell’s written works prior to 2022 as “100% human-written,” while a test of nine of his works published this year returned a median “AI-written” percentage of 96%. Between 2019 and 2026, Schnell did not publish any academic works or op-eds for which he was the sole author credited, according to his online curriculum vitae.Pangram 4.0 assesses whether a work is AI-written by separating the submitted text into smaller segments, which are then identified as “human,” “AI-assisted” or “AI-generated,” according to a Pangram technical report.
…Schnell’s Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself “100% AI-written,” according to a Pangram test.
Here is the full story, you people crack me up…
Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?
Some people are suggesting this, including Ezra Klein.
I do not understand how it is supposed to work. Put aside the issue of foregone innovations, let us say I seek to access an AI from overseas. Am I allowed to visit their website? So many sites have AI behind them, including Chinese open source AI. Do all of those sites get banned? And how? Firewall imposed on Americans? And we cannot put the good open source models on our hard drives? How enforced? Does the government have to read the creation logs of the model (how can they?), and then decide whether I can use that model or not?
What if Anthropic licenses its IP to an independent subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and they keep on using code to improve the AI? Or maybe only foreign nations are allowed to have the best models and the really fast rates of improvement? How are multinationals supposed to operate across borders? (Presumably you cannot just use the RSI of your foreign affiliate, but then the whole MNC is crippled and eventually rendered uncompetitive?) How are we to keep “AI sovereignty” for Americans?
If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute. How safe is that? And in the short run, do we also have to stop American firms from selling their compute abroad?
Does this whole thing mean that regular companies can use AI to write code, but the main labs cannot? Solve for the equilibrium there. Or the whole code writing function goes away for everybody?
What is the political mechanism through which RSI progress gets turned back on again, and when? Is it as rational as our current debate over data centers? If the top companies are no longer building RSI models, how are they supposed to know how safe or unsafe they might be?
At current margins, are humans even capable of writing the next steps of code that are required for further progress? At whatever speed?
I do not find this to be a workable idea. I think it is “people wanting to do something that sounds reasonable and less scary,” without thinking through the practical details. I have made a related point before, but one does best with AI policy when you start with the stuff that otherwise you might put into your last two or three paragraphs of an essay (“It remains to be seen how…but we are all human beings and surely we should not give up hope…”). Even if you believe in a deal with China, and I do not, we (and others) now know competitors can catch up more quickly than we had thought, at least if they think they have a chance of winning. They might even buy some space compute from Elon.
C’mon people, I know for many of you this is a difficult take to swallow, because it feels like “we don’t care enough” if we do not take some dramatic steps. Nonetheless the reality is that, a long time ago, we made a whole series of decisions that imply…we have no other choice than to just see this one through and get it more or less right. The longer we deny that truth, the harder it will be for all of us.
Further results on AI and labor market reallocation
This paper documents how artificial intelligence has affected stocks and flows in the U.S. labor market. Combining CPS and JOLTS data with AI exposure and adoption measures from OpenAI and Lightcast, respectively, we construct labor force stocks, worker flows, and market tightness by AI exposure and adoption. Since the introduction of LLMs, workers with high AI exposure and adoption have experienced larger declines in job-finding and job-switching rates than other groups, while their within-job activity switching has increased noticeably relative to others. The positive effects of AI on nominal wage growth and hours worked attenuate markedly in the post-LLM period, suggesting that LLM-driven reallocation has operated through within-firm task reorganization and a reconfiguration of labor inputs, alongside weaker demand for workers most exposed to AI. To quantify LLM-driven reallocation pressure, we construct individual-level hirability and separability indices and showthat dispersion in job-finding prospects has risen markedly since 2023, largely driven by the AI factors. The natural rate of unemployment—recovered from the trend components of unemployment inflows and outflows by AI exposure and adoption, as well as from a theoretical model of structural unemployment—is estimated to have risen by about 0.1-0.2 percentage point since the introduction of LLMs, albeit with considerable uncertainty.
That is from a new NBER conference paper by Hie Joo Ahn and Nicholas A. Carollo. Via Inclusive Productivity Network and Alex Imas.
Monday assorted links
2. “[The Mises] library now has a permanent independent home: https://freecapitalists.org/. It holds 945 books, 3,374 journal issues and 2,732 recorded lectures, all free, in PDF, EPUB and MOBI, with the rights recorded per work.”
Obama on agentic AI
Obama recently said:
“If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having agentic AI and having it just roaming free in the internet.”
As Roon noted: “this sounds completely incoherent to me”
From Rob Saker:
An agent is a system that can plan, use tools, write code, query data, run experiments, check its own work, and keep going. That is how the work gets done. Treating “agentic” as optional decoration, as if the serious version of AI is a polite chatbot locked in a box while the unserious version “roams free on the internet”, is the kind of sentence you write when you’ve heard the buzzwords and never watched a lab actually use the technology. You do not cure cancer with a model that only answers questions. You cure cancer with systems that can read the literature, propose hypotheses, design assays, analyze results, rewrite the next experiment, and do that loop a thousand times faster than a human postdoc. That loop is agentic. Strip the agency out and you are left with a very expensive autocomplete.
I agree with those points, but my main concern is different. How would we enforce such a prohibition on commercial agents? Set up a Chinese-like firewall that bans Americans from accessing sites with foreign agents? Monitor all those sites over time, so we know which suppliers to ban? Ban VPN as well? Give our government the power to inspect hard drives, in case agentic functions might be embedded there? Set up FBI “phishes,” luring Americans in with the prospect of agent access from abroad, and then arresting them, as we do with child ****?
Something else? How about insisting that all American (and foreign?) web sites set up tough captcha problems, so that agents may not be used (ha ha)?
You might also ask how an AI “agent” is to be defined, after all even O3 had some “agentic” abilities, such as opening up museum web sites to see which exhibits are on. Is it typing things into boxes and filling out forms that is to be prohibited? How much regulation of software would that require, how would that regulation actually occur, and what else would end up being restricted?
I do not think Obama intends to be supporting massive restrictions on freedom of speech and civil liberties. Rather this is a good example of how some political factions will simply have “ideas about what might be good,” without having freedom concerns — or for that matter practicality and civil liberties concerns — center of mind in the first place.
And this would cause the immediate bankruptcy of both Anthropic and OpenAI, right?
I can readily imagine that, upon the advent of agentic AI, we need some significant changes in our cyber laws. Now would be a good time to both commission and also cite some peer-reviewed academic literature on this matter!? That is not an impossible thing to do, yet our public discourse seems oddly resistant to the notion.
Addendum: And do not forget the classic Gwern piece, remarkably early in its prescience.
Sunday assorted links
3. Dead brains and the piano??
4. “A real contribution of AI is showing the critical weaknesses of humans and human structures.” But can we take it?
5. When did the Chinese reach New Zealand? (speculative)
7. “you have no idea how fast the world will accelerate AI progress if a world war began” — no major war (in addition to the status quo) would be one excellent move in the direction of AI (and other) safety.
Saturday assorted links
Friday assorted links
1. Gender differences in financial information processing.
2. Urban harassment of women in India.
3. The making of Roger Scruton?
4. Astra vs. Enigma.
6. Dan Ariely update. And running for office in Israel.
7. A more sober look at the HuggingFace incident (WSJ).
Why Papua New Guinea is so interesting
And this leads to the most interesting part of this story: how the highlanders were so isolated for so long.
I want to acknowledge that the highlanders were not completely, hermetically sealed off from the outside world – it’s just that knowledge of outside world never actually made it to them or vice versa.
Over time, a few goods did make their way up to the highlands: pigs, about 3,000 years ago; the sweet potato, which is South American and arrived about 300 to 400 years ago; and tobacco, also American, which came the same way.
The journey the sweet potato and tobacco took to get there is a good example of how this all worked without transmitting further information. The Spanish and Portuguese brought both plants to the spice islands (in what is now Indonesia), just off the western tip of New Guinea, in the 1500s. The sultanates had been trading with the western tip of the coastal region of New Guinea for centuries. So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her. Each new family then planted the same, saw that it worked, and passed it on. At that pace the sweet potato crossed the highlands in a century or two, with nobody knowing where it came from beyond the tribe beside them.
And what fascinates me is that even with the highlands as sealed off as they were, such significant goods still got in. Sweet potatoes allowed a population explosion in the highlands: they give far more calories per acre, and pigs can live off them. So in a 10,000 year sealed off universe, after the invention of agriculture, the biggest change to highland life happened in the last 500 years, which I guess isn’t a coincidence, as the sweet potato got there through the same structural forces that later brought the Australians.
Here is much more from Daniel Frank, fascinating throughout.
Thursday assorted links
1. An American at Brazil’s largest rodeo.
2. Ingeborg Bachmann centenary.
3. “Huawei Technologies Co. predicted on Wednesday that global computing demand will surge 100,000-fold by 2035, with AI agents generating over 90% of network traffic.” And a report from someone who has done AI diplomacy with China (NYT).
4. “US Gov Federal Register use distilled Qwen models in their search mode.”
Pandemic Preparation is AI Safety
I am not a big fan of the “now more than ever” post, which interprets recent events to support—surprise!—something the writer already believed. And yet…is it not obvious that AI risk increases the value of pandemic preparation?
If COVID began with a laboratory leak—plausible, though unproven—then a research accident has already killed millions. Whatever its origin, COVID demonstrated the scale of the potential damage. AI surely increases pandemic risks. If you have ever used AI to fix your washing machine, you understand the difference between reading a manual and having a tutor by your side helping to troubleshoot each problem. The same distinction matters for biological research at the laboratory bench.
Anthropic’s threat report documents five cases of researchers using its models in ways that “could support biological weapons development.” These included military-linked virus research and plans for work on pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential. Did the researchers intend to build weapons? We don’t know. But some users circumvented access controls and concealed sensitive aspects of their research.
Some safeguards appear to have worked but we don’t know the base rate. And what will happen with open-weight models and AIs not under the control of a large corporation? The safeguards also burden legitimate researchers. We should accept that AI will magnify the power of small groups, ill-intentioned or not.
Of course, AI can accelerate vaccines and treatments too. But faster science does not automatically mean faster defense. Turning discoveries into deployed vaccines and treatments requires institutions that can act quickly. We should not assume those institutions will keep pace with the technology.
That makes the recommendations in my 2025 paper, Pandemic Preparation Without Romance, more urgent (surprise!): wastewater surveillance; prediction markets; pre-developed vaccine libraries; human challenge trials planned in advance; a Pandemic Trust Fund; and temporary Operation Warp Speed–style public–private partnerships.
My paper argues that pandemic policy should not depend on unusually farsighted or wise politicians. Public tripwires and banked resources are what you build when you don’t trust the authorities to move quickly in a crisis hence the value of ideas like wastewater surveillance, vaccine libraries, and ready challenge-trial protocols. None of these technologies is highly expensive nor do they require much in the way of continued investment and attention, hence pandemic preparation without romance.
My excellent Conversation with Annie Lowrey
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Annie Lowrey’s new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you’re poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don’t work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption.
So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity’s role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she’ll learn next, and more.
Excerpt:
LOWREY: The postal service and Social Security’s retirement programs. Those are both pretty good. Social Security also has other programs, SSI, which is mostly used by very, very low-income seniors with disabilities or who are blind. Disability insurance is run by the Social Security Administration. The retirement program, it’s less than 1 percent overhead. It’s great. It does all the work for you.
COWEN: Isn’t our whole postal service a time tax in the aggregate? Denmark, just this year, abolished its postal service. They don’t have any. Now, I understand we’re not in a position to do exactly the same, but shouldn’t we be moving away from postal service, basically zeroing it out over the next 10 years?
LOWREY: Did they make it so that it’s all digital? Did they digitize things?
COWEN: Well, I don’t know who the “they” is. Direct mail there has gone away.
LOWREY: Oh, yes, that’s interesting. I don’t know. I think in a high inequality country such as ours, where you still have a lot of people who don’t have smartphones and don’t have computers, that’s why I would be very concerned about the postal service going away.
COWEN: That’s why we need 10 years. You want to tax people, tax in the broad sense of the term, living in rural areas, if only because it’s much harder to have government help them, right?
LOWREY: Yes.
COWEN: If rural areas don’t get mail anymore, maybe that’s a good thing.
LOWREY: I don’t think that that’s a good thing for the people in the rural areas, though. There’s always going to be people in rural areas. As a general point, do you want the government to be encouraging people to not live in rural areas?
COWEN: Absolutely, that’s me. Welcome to the show.
LOWREY: That’s feels very nanny state-ish of you, Tyler.
COWEN: I don’t want to subsidize rural areas, and we do it in so many ways, including with our farm programs.
LOWREY: We do. We really, really absolutely do.
COWEN: It gets harder to help people with government. There’s a lot more market power in rural areas, like how many supermarkets are there, how many hospitals, probably just one, if that. Let’s get everyone into the suburbs, or heaven forbid, the cities.
LOWREY: I can’t imagine a less popular policy than that.
COWEN: Absolutely.
Interesting throughout, and full of good spirit. Again, here is Annie’s very good book The Time Tax: How Government Wastes Our Time — And How to Fix It.