Category: Web/Tech

The USG program with the highest benefit-cost ratio?

I am talking here about individual, discrete activities of the government, not general or overall functions.  How about this for a nomination, namely US Embassy air quality tweets?:

Over 4 million premature deaths per year are attributed to air pollution, most of which are in low- and middle-income countries where residents do not have access to reliable information on air quality. We evaluate a large-scale program that provided real-time air-quality updates at over 40 US diplomatic sites around the world with poor preexisting monitoring. We find that the embassy monitoring program led to substantial reductions in fine particulate concentration levels, resulting in substantial decreases in the premature mortality risk faced by the over 300 million people living in cities home to a US embassy monitor. Our research indicates that monitoring and information interventions that draw attention to poor air quality in developing countries can generate substantial benefits.

Did you take these benefits into account last time you were bitching about Twitter?  Probably not.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

EDS

If I write about a government program in the abstract, some of you respond in a pretty reasonable manner.  Instead, if I tie the program to the status of a well-known personality, such as Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden, Trump, and so on, the quality of the responses is much lower.  Including from very smart people.

Take this insight to heart and apply it to your current thoughts about the new Twitter.

How many of you have written me to say that people “won’t pay $8 a month for Blue Check,” or whatever the latest suggested price might be?

Note from Elon’s own words that a) “You will also get: – Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam – Ability to post long video & audio – Half as many ads”, and b) “And paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us”, and c) “This will also give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators”.

Please do read those words carefully.

Now I do not myself pretend to know what will work for Twitter.  But one implication of this proposal is that a free version of Twitter still will be available.  Is it so crazy to think that the forthcoming free version of Twitter will be “good enough” to keep the current users on?

Note also that under the proposed new regime, payments go both ways!  Hardly any of the critics note this.

Or do you think markets are most efficient when all payments are set to zero and kept there?  Maybe in some settings, but overall?  I just do not see why this kind of plan is so doomed to fail.  Let’s pay the creators who attract other Twitter users to create more and to induce more Twitter impressions.  An externality is present, right?

As a friend of mine once said “Never underestimate Elon”…of course I would invoke more rational responses if I instead wrote “Do not underestimate the current Twitter management team and proposal.”  But I won’t because I, like Elon, sometimes enjoy trolling you all.

Elon’s current Twitter strategy

Not macro, but super-micro.  Relative status is what gets people talking, and what is more relative status than “Blue Check” on Twitter.  And so everyone is talking about Twitter over the last few days.

Duh.

Here is the latest pricing proposal:

And adjusted for PPP.  Read the whole thread, a lot of privileges will come with the status, and I suspect spam problems will de facto force most people into this option.  See you there!  And Elon is already ahead of the critics on this one, and was all along.

The MR bot, John McDonnell working with Bryan Gilbert Davis

From John:

“I actually built a bot to produce “an MR take”:

It’s live here: https://www.vibecheck.network/

Intro video here: https://www.loom.com/share/e307765429db4fe38efd2fc822bb4529

(We applied to the stability AI grant but didn’t get it)

I think the results need to get a bit better (“Are aliens real” is pretty good, “What should I eat in Oaxaca?” is not good). I put some decent queries in the postscript.

Regarding your article I actually think attribution will be really important. AIs have a tendency to confabulate (the term d’art in the literature seems to be “hallucination”). Attribution is what tells you that the information is real and wasn’t just invented or pulled from some other hallucinating AI.

What would you want this world to be like? A couple thoughts I had:

  • I agree that compactness will be desirable, but also “authentic” non-AI content will be valued. Imagine custom briefings about daily trends with a few of the “best” tweets pulled into the briefing.
  • Who do you trust? You don’t want your AI pulling from any old source. There are few universal authorities anymore. I’m imagining that there may be “webs of trust” where e.g. I trust Tyler, he trusts someone else so I trust that other source at least a little. The DSA might publish lists of “approved socialist sources”.
  • How do you want to feel? Can I make you a feed that’s “uplifting”? “Insightful”? Maybe if people can control their own algorithms we get a sort of do-over on social media and people get control of their attention back.
  • “Idea lineage” … can I select the term “mood affiliation” on a recent post and get a lineage of the way the blog uses that term, hopefully get a contextual definition, etc…
  • I’m curious about combining every source in someone’s digital life. What if we could link article, highlights, notes, emails, Slacks, etc? This is sort of huge but could get interesting.

If we were to iterate on Vibecheck are there ideas you’d like to see prototyped?

…PS a few queries that have decent answers:

* What is the Great Stagnation?* What do Russians believe about Ukraine?* Are aliens real?* Should I start a startup?* Should I support the TPP?”

TC again: I am already impressed.  But I think many of you don’t understand what this looks like when hundreds of trillion (yes, trillion) of parameters are brought to bear on the problem, as will someday (soon) be evident.

How AI will change everything on the internet

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, Washington Post reprint here, and yes people this is for real.  Here is one excerpt:

Change is coming. Consider Twitter, which I use each morning to gather information about the world. Less than two years from now, maybe I will speak into my computer, outline my topics of interest, and somebody’s version of AI will spit back to me a kind of Twitter remix, in a readable format and tailored to my needs.

The AI also will be not only responsive but active. Maybe it will tell me, “Today you really do need to read about Russia and changes in the UK government.” Or I might say, “More serendipity today, please,” and that wish would be granted.

I also could ask, “What are my friends up to?” and I would receive a useful digest of web and social media services. Or I could ask the AI for content in a variety of foreign languages, all impeccably translated. Very often you won’t use Google, you will just ask your question to the AI and receive an answer, in audio form for your commute if you like. If your friends were especially interested in some video clips or passages from news stories, those might be more likely to be sent to you.

In short, many of the current core internet services will be intermediated by AI. This will create a fundamentally new kind of user experience.

It is unlikely that the underlying services will vanish. People will still Google things, and people will still read and write on their Facebook pages. But more will move directly to the AI aggregator. This dynamic is already happening: When was the last time you asked Google for directions? They exist online, of course, but if you’re like me, you just use Google maps and GPS directly. You have in effect moved to the information aggregator.

Or consider blogs, which arguably peaked between 2001 and 2012. Then Twitter and Facebook became aggregators of blog content. Blogs are still numerous, but many people get access to them directly through aggregators. Now that process is going to take another step — because the current aggregators will themselves be aggregated and organized, by super-smart forms of machine intelligence.

The world of ideas will be turned upside down. Many public intellectuals excel at promoting themselves on Twitter and other social media, and those opportunities may diminish. There will be a new skill — promoting oneself to the AI — of a still unknown nature.

Of course there is more at the links above.  I could have written a much longer column of course.  Just imagine asking the service of your choice for “a Tyler take” or “an Alex take.”  Solve for the whole equilibrium!  Many more institutions are aggregators than you might at first think…

Emergent Ventures, 22nd cohort

Emily Karlzen, Arizona, Founder and CEO of Arch Rift, to develop an astronaut helmet for commercial space flight.

Mehran Jalali, for building energy storage systems, NYC, grew up in Iran.

Kyle Redlinghuys, a further award, recently launched an API to make the data from the James Webb Space Telescope available.

Pranav Myana, 18, University of Texas, Austin, working on incorporating renewable power into the grid.

Brian Chau, Waterloo (Canada), general career support for writing and podcasting. Here is his Substack.

Cathal J. Nolan, historian, Boston University, to write a book on the relationship between war and progress. Just learned he was born in Dublin.

Cynthia Haven, Stanford University, to write a book on John Milton and the 17th century.  Twitter here.

Harsehaj Dhami, 17, lives in Ontario, to visit a Longevity conference in Copenhagen.  LinkedIn here.

Jackson Oswalt, Knoxville, builds things, AR/XR stuff, for general career support.  In the Guinness Book of World Records for achieving a nuclear fusion reaction at age 12.

Miguel Ignacio Solano and Maria Elena Solano, Bogota/Cambridge, MA, co-founders of VMind, an artificial intelligence project.

Brian Kelleher, 18, Dublin, to improve software for doctors.

Devon Zuegel, to develop a new village and community, Twitter here.

Rodolfo Herrera, Pensamiento Libre, market-oriented Facebook and YouTube videos for Mexico.

Alia Abbas, 19, Maryland, to study biochemistry and materials and for general career development.

There are two other projects not yet ready for public announcement.

Ukraine tranche: There is now a new Emergent Ventures Ukraine.

Julia Brodsky, Maryland, former instructor of astronauts.  To support educational efforts to teach on-line STEM and other subjects to Ukrainian children in refugee camps.

Uliana Ronska, 17, Prague and Netherlands currently.  She is doing research on problems of triangulating fast-moving stars. It was also under her leadership that her team won ExPhO, CETO, and 2 all-Ukrainian Motion physics olympiads.  For general career development.

Demian Zhelyabovskyy, currently at Bromsgrove School in the UK, from Kyiv.  Last year he won first place in the All-Ukrainian Physics Marathon; also he and his teammates won the Experimental Physics Olympiad (ExPhO) and Computer Experiment Team Olympiad (CETO).  For general career support, and for the physics paper he is currently co-authoring.

Tymofiy Mylovanov, representing the Kyiv School of Economics, to nurture talent development for Ukraine.  Tymofiy as an individual was also the very first Emergent Ventures winner.

Congratulations to all, I am honored to be working with you!

How much will AI succeed in the arts?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and let us start with what is likely to work well:

It almost goes without saying that the AI revolution currently underway is impressive. It is likely to have a huge impact in some parts of art world, such as the commercial sphere — consumers are generally not interested in who made any given ad or logo. It either works or it does not, and those conditions favor the machine. AI will also give the world quality (automated) personal assistants and autonomous vehicles, among many other advances.

But here is the problem:

Consider music. If Taylor Swift’s or Beyonce’s songs had been made by a software program, with no star at the microphone, would they be nearly as popular? It is no accident that Taylor Swift has more than 227 million Instagram followers — her fans want more than just the music, and that extra something (at least so far) has to be supplied by a living, breathing human being.

In the world of the visual arts, too, collectors are often buying the story as much as the artist. Even the experts have trouble distinguishing a real Kasimir Malevich painting from a fake (he painted abstract black squares on a white background, with a minimum of detail). The same image and physical item, when connected to the actual hand of the artist, is worth millions — but if shown to be a fake, it counts for zero.

Here is a qualification:

There will undoubtedly be many collaborations between AI and human creators, with the humans put forward as the public face of the joint effort. Periodic scandals about authorship will surface (“did he write any of that song?”), just as allegations of cheating with AI have risen to prominence in chess. AI-generated art will attract the most interest when the aesthetic of the creation and the personality of the human accompanist appear to be in sync.

And this:

Imagine that you took some souped-up future version of GPT-3 and fed it all the world’s texts through the year 1500. Would you expect it to be able to come up with something equally important and original as Shakespeare’s plays, or Newton’s Three Laws? How about Strawberry Fields Forever? Skepticism on this point has hardly been refuted by recent advances, however impressive they may be.

We watch Magnus Carlsen, not Stockfish vs. Alpha Zero, even though the latter match is of higher quality and likely more exciting too, at least in terms of moves over the board.

That was then, this is now

From 2018:

On May 9, PayPal is participating in the Net Neutrality Day of Action through its trade association Internet Association to support a free and open internet…Throughout the day of May 9, IA and all of its member companies will communicate their support for enforceable principles such as a ban on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization…Those lack of choices can lead to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) playing gatekeeper to content and access.

Net neutrality for thee, but not for me…

The $2500 fine (read it and weep)

At first I thought this was Twitter b.s., but no I have been referred to the PayPal website update:

You may not use the PayPal service for activities that…involve the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion, (a) are harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable, (b) depict or appear to depict nudity, sexual or other intimate activities, (c) depict or promote illegal drug use, (d) depict or promote violence,  criminal activity, cruelty, or self-harm (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) (f) present a risk to user safety or wellbeing, (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation, or are unlawful, (h) infringe the privacy, intellectual property rights, or other proprietary rights of any party, or (i) are otherwise unfit for publication.

You can’t buy Traveler’s Checks (with PayPal) either!  For each offense, at the discretion of PayPal: “Violation of this Acceptable Use Policy constitutes a violation of the PayPal User Agreement and may subject you to damages, including liquidated damages of $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation, which may be debited directly from your PayPal account(s) as outlined in the User Agreement…”

Update: The policy partially has been walked back, I don’t yet know the full details.  And note that in 2018 PayPal was supporting net neutrality!

“But are you long volatility?”

As many of you know, when I confront mega-pessimists I like to ask them “But are you short the market?”  Not once in my life have I heard a satisfactory rejoinder to this query.  (The last answer I heard was “I will be!”.)

I now have a new question for those who see a reasonably high likelihood of AGI.  Of course AGI could wreck the world, make the world a whole lot better, or simply overturn multiple sectors of the economy, in both good and bad ways.  If you believe in AGI, typically you believe it will matter a lot, though there is considerable disagreement on the cost-benefit ratio.

So basically you should go long volatility, both of the aggregate market and sector-by-sector.

Can I call them AGIers?  (“Aggies” is already taken.)  AGIers ought to be long volatility.

Are they?  I have started asking this question, and I plan to continue the practice.

India fact of the day

Not even 200 of the approximate 10,000 students from the Indian Institutes of Technology took up positions outside India last year. Fifty students, who make up the largest contingent, will be leaving from IIT-Bombay, followed by 40 from Delhi, 25 from Kharagpur, 19 from Kanpur, 13 from Madras, 17 from Roorkee and five from Guwahati. In 2012, 84 IIT-B candidates had accepted international job offers.

“Compared to 20 years ago, a very small percentage of students go abroad today. This is contrary to the general perception ,” says IIT-Delhi director V Ramgopal Rao. “Twenty years ago, 80% of the BTech class used to go abroad. Now these numbers are insignificant.”

Here is the full story, from 2017, via Elad Gil.

My Conversation with Byron Auguste

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is my introduction:

TYLER COWEN:  Today I am here…with Byron Auguste, who is president and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a civic enterprise which aims to improve the US labor market. Byron served for two years in the White House as deputy assistant to the president for economic policy and deputy director to the National Economic Council. Until 2013, he was senior partner at McKinsey and worked there for many years. He has also been an economist at LMC International, Oxford University, and the African Development Bank.

He is author of a 1995 book called The Economics of International Payments Unions and Clearing Houses. He has a doctorate of philosophy and economics from Oxford University, an undergraduate econ degree from Yale, and has been a Marshall Scholar. Welcome.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: As you know, more and more top universities are moving away from requiring standardized testing for people applying. Is this good or bad from your point of view?

AUGUSTE: I think it’s really too early to tell because the question is —

COWEN: But you want alternative markers, not just what kind of family you came from, what kind of prep you had. If you’re just smart, why shouldn’t we let you standardize test?

AUGUSTE: I think alternative markers are key. This is actually a pretty complicated issue, and I’ve talked to university administrators and admissions people, and it’s interesting, the variety of different ways they’re trying to work on this.

But I will say this. If you think about something like the SAT, when it first started — I’m talking about in the 1930s essentially — it was an alternative route into a college. It started with the Ivies. It was started with James Conant and Harvard and the Ivies and the Seven Sisters and the rest, and then it gradually moved out.

The problem they were trying to solve back in the ’30s was that up until that point, the way you got into, say, Dartmouth is the headmaster of Choate would write to Dartmouth and say, “Here’s our 15 candidates for Dartmouth.” Dartmouth would mostly take them because Choate knew what Dartmouth wanted. Then you had the high school movement in the US, where between 1909 and 1939, you went from 9 percent of American teenagers going to high school to 79 percent going to high school.

Now, suddenly, you had high school students applying to college. They were at Dubuque Normal School in Iowa. How does Dartmouth know whether this person was . . . The people from Choate didn’t start taking the SATs, but the SAT — even though it was a pretty terrible test at the time, it was better than nothing. It was a way that someone who was out there — not in the normal feeder schools — could distinguish themselves.

I think that is a very valuable role to play. As you know, Tyler, the SAT does, to some extent, still play that role. But also, because now that everybody has had to use it, it also is something that can be gamed more — test prep and all the rest of it.

COWEN: But it tracks IQ pretty closely. And a lot of Asian schools way overemphasize standard testing, I would say, and they’ve risen to very high levels of quality very quickly. It just seems like a good thing to do.

Most of all we cover jobs, training/retraining, and education.  Interesting throughout.