Opportunity cost is invisible â but itâs one of the biggest bills in history.
Imagine a very different 2025.
You can hop on a supersonic plane and get from New York to Los Angeles in 30 minutes or from New York to Japan in two hours instead of 20. Weâve got tremendous energy abundance with cheap, clean nuclear energy and sweeping fields of solar cells with batteries. There is no climate crisis or activists gluing themselves to famous paintings.
Robotic factories build everything from toys to advanced microchips. Machine learning solved protein folding 20 years earlier and powered a medical revolution, with permanent CRISPR cures for cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia. Stem cell therapies for damaged hearts came a decade earlier, saving tens of millions of people from early death. Nanotech robots eat arterial plaque, and we have mRNA cures for HIV, Zika, breast and prostate cancer.
A grid of seventh-generation Starlink satellites beams down InfiniBand-speed internet across the globe. Using a robot and lag-free, ultra-high-definition VR, a top doctor in New York can now perform life-saving surgery on a patient halfway across the world.
How did we get to this sci-fi future decades early? In the years leading up to it, the Luddites and other enemies of innovation failed at every attempt to cripple, crush, or kill progress.
In the world of flight, there was no backlash against âsonic boomsâ or runaway fears after the Concord explosion. Instead, engineers did with supersonic jets what theyâve done with every other kind of plane: they made them safer. In 2022, there was just one airplane passenger injury for every 15 billion miles flown, and supersonic jets could be just as safe â but much faster.
Anti-nuclear activists didnât kill nuclear expansion in the 1970s. Instead, the US kept right on building reactors, leading to a carbon emissions chart like Franceâs. We have safe, clean, abundant energy, and thereâs no talk of degrowth or slowing down â just what to build next.
The US didnât pull funding for stem cells during the Bush administration, and in Africa and Asia, widespread technophobia didnât prevent the approval of genetically modified crops that could save the vision â and lives â of millions of the continentsâ most-vulnerable residents.
Unfortunately, thatâs not the world we got. So, what went wrong?
The answer is that, in way too many cases, the Luddites won. They slammed the brakes on technology and progress out of unfounded fears or personal beliefs, and we all paid the price.
Activists push big, scary headlines about the bad things they predict a technology will bring, but they ignore the good things we stand to lose without the technology.
The hidden price of technophobia is incredibly high, too. The real cost of these doomsday policies is in the air we breathe, the families who bury loved ones too soon, the new kinds of jobs that never get created, and the rockets that never blast off.
Activists push big, scary headlines about the bad things they predict a technology will bring: a silent spring, mass unemployment, a new ice age. But they ignore the good things we stand to lose without the technology: the jobs that never get created, the clean air we donât breathe, the cascade of new inventions that never come to be.
When you throw a wrench in the wheels of progress, an alternative future full of opportunities disappears. Enemies of innovation may think theyâre doing the right thing by slowing progress down, but they too often fail to consider how gumming up the works causes us to miss out on good things.
What diseases will we cure with stem cell breakthroughs decades later than we could have because we wasted eight years in the second Bush administration restricting the research? How many damaged lungs did we get because we killed off nuclear and kept right on burning coal to keep up with electricity demand?
Opportunity cost is invisible â but as weâve seen time and again, itâs one of the biggest bills in history.
From pop to string quartets (though not all the songs in this video are 100% AI), and platforms like Deezer, AI is starting to impact the music industry and artist royalties.
AI Cannibals Eat Into $20 Billion Music Market
Streaming platforms need to carry a health warning about the provenance of some of their tunes.
The song Echoes of Tomorrow is a laid-back, catchy tune that might happily slot into a summertime playlists on Spotify or Apple Music. Only the lyrics, which make curious references to âalgorithms,â reveal its non-human creator: Artificial intelligence.
The trackâs mimicry of flesh-and-blood pop is pretty unsettling. Yet whatâs really disturbing is the sheer quantity of similar AI tunes sloshing around online. Tools like Udio and Suno, trained on millions of songs crafted by human artists, are now churning out millions of their own tunes at the click of a button. Deezer SA, a rival of Spotify Technology SA, estimates 20,000 AI tracks are uploaded to its platform daily, or 18% of the total. While they only account for 0.5% of total listens, real royalties are being earned and often fraudulently so, judging by the spread of bots to amplify listens. This may not be a Napster-scale issue yet â but the $20 billion music market is clearly vulnerable. (...)
ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study
This part is great.....
Ironically, upon the paperâs release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to âonly read this table below,â thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.
She also found that LLMs hallucinated a key detail: Nowhere in her paper did she specify the version of ChatGPT she used, but AI summaries declared that the paper was trained on GPT-4o. âWe specifically wanted to see that, because we were pretty sure the LLM would hallucinate on that,â she says, laughing.
didn't o3 pro one shot this right after the claim?
looks like an embarrassing moment for apple
this appears to be a breakdown
am i missing something?
should apple retract this paper?
Author, journalist, & activist Cory Doctorow joins Bad Faith to discuss his latest book, Picks & Shovels, the utility of fiction as a vehicle to expose scams and create urgency around political action, enshitification, and why so many people misunderstand the threat of AI.
Yes, the maximisation of profit... In many respects, that's one of the major issues. Monetizing everything is just evil, be it from the point of view of selling or buying. Companies trying to patent the living... And now with AI, it just seems that the metastasization rate is just going to speed up.
Sometimes I wish that there were a social utility index for jobs that could be used to weigh on the wages that are made. I sort of realise that it's very complex, but somehow I don't think we should just cave in to that complexity, which is in many ways our own making. Perhaps we should start by taking stock of what we have, what our resources and potential are, try to decide what we'd want (safety, health, understanding and some happiness would be a good start) and then figure out how we can get there, even if it means changing it all, starting with ourselves. I know I must sound silly and naive, but I can't say I'm finding a lot of more inspiring approaches out there.
To go back to AI, I heard myself advise my 14-year old son to use AI to ask it to proof read and explain the mistakes on an essay he has to write for his German class. He's not likely to get any help from me (I can't speak German) and his teacher could be better. But it somehow hurt to tell him that, almost in spite of myself.
I signed up for a workshop on AI in teaching / learning in the university where I teach and I'm curious of what's going to come out of it.
This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI â a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output â it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."
This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages: (...)
