Potential legislative solutions to this challenge include the Retirement Savings for Americans Act of 2023 and the Portable Benefits for Independent Workers Pilot Program Act. @digitalarun.bsky.social describes these and others in more detail in the article. www.brookings.edu/articles/wor...

a long article about whether the “power of the purse” that Congress wields is a floor or a ceiling on Presidential spending.

a fun (long) read from @caity.bsky.social. As Kramer once said, it’s “a story about love, deception, greed, lust and unbridled enthusiasm. yes, that’s what led to Billy Mumphrey’s downfall…”

Our first Tech Leadership Lab of 2025 is on Wednesday 02/05 at 4:45PM: former Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson chats with @digitalarun.bsky.social about guiding Etsy from startup to IPO and beyond, growing revenue 14x 2011-2017, and lessons since imparted to dozens of startups. Sign up: bit.ly/dickersonTLL

How? By shifting youth thinking from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.” You might disagree with him and see this as a narrative fitted retrospectively to justify today’s position — but its a fascinating perspective nevertheless.

Before we compete with AI for our jobs, we’ll be competing with it for our electricity. This issue will be central to the AI policy debate. Infrastructure power needs are also going to be a critical constraint for many countries seeking AI sovereignty.

Our next Fireside Chat features Markus Herrmann Chen of the China Macro Group. Join us Monday, January 27th at 12:30PM to discuss the #TikTokBan and what the incoming Trump administration could mean for China's tech sector and US-China tech competition. Register now: bit.ly/mhchen

The week’s more visible changes in Meta content filtering obscured these revelations about their training data governance choices. Here’s hoping 2025 brings greater clarity about how broadly the #fairuse doctrine covers copyrighted works being used to train #AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude and Llama

“Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life, so long as one is not bored,” Kierkegaard wrote.

the #OpenAI plan to become a for-profit company reminds me of this old cartoon.

1/ in an interesting experiment, #sora created a white male-presenting character when prompted to generate an “academic giving a lecture.” what’s surprising is that it consistently did so on 16 consecutive trials. This will likely be “rectified” rapidly, but raises familiar (and hard) questions:

I'm hiring a one-year post doc for research on AI, new tech and Future of Work Ideal candidate has Special Sworn Status and Census RDC experience. Interfolio link: apply.interfolio.com/158246 (NYU's term for "post doc" is "research scientist") AEA JOE link: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

Some of my thoughts on OpenAI's o3 and the ARC-AGI benchmark aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai...

Triggered by @annagoeddeke.bsky.social's post: "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas" (a very cool paper) makes me wonder if government economic policy bodies should include experts from the other social sciences with an established track record of interdisciplinary thinking. Longer version below.

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER is a Christmas movie. Change my mind.

18 months later, my June 2023 TEDx talk about the challenges that generative AI might pose to human intellectual autonomy is finally online. Would be delighted to hear what you think. (And yes, I know, Google’s LLM is not called Bard any more:)

I wrote something about the migration from X to Bluesky. (I did not choose the title, and do not like it, but there you go.) www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...

me holding a silicon wafer at ASML’s headquarters last week. i’d argue that their machines represent humanity’s most incredible engineering accomplishment to date.

so here’s an essay i wrote for the @aspeninstitute.bsky.social recently. our focus on copyright and training data is making us miss the more important IP challenge raised by #AI: making sure people have sufficient ownership over their human capital. www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/a...

writing research papers about seeding a new network effects product is so much more fun than actually doing it as a user..