Dear Friends,
“There are decades where nothing happens,” quipped Lenin, “and there are weeks where decades happen.” But we only know in retrospect.
On October 9, 1903, the New York Times editorial board predicted that it would take between 1 million to 10 million years for humans to fly. Just nine weeks later, the Wright Brothers proved them wrong. Imagine the world today if the New York Times editors had been right!1
The Wright Brothers did the impossible in two months while researchers have predicted near-term nuclear fusion for over half a century.2 Perhaps scientific discovery is like Hemingway’s observation about bankruptcy: “gradually, then suddenly.”
It sure feels like we’re in a “suddenly” moment now, but that’s how Marvin Minsky felt in 1967 when he claimed, “Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved.” Oops.
So how do we know if a scientific breakthrough is weeks or decades away? How do we know if we’re in a “gradually” or a “suddenly” phase? How do you assess a new technology’s likely impact on society?
We can only know in hindsight. I remember when Ethan Zuckerman, a technology researcher and former colleague, predicted that the iPhone would bomb because, really, who could be bothered pecking on a tiny screen with their thumbs?3 I’ve gotten plenty wrong too. I predicted that Google wouldn’t support its search business with advertising because, really, who clicks on ads?
Are we two years or two decades away from the point when AI will be more efficient and accurate at nearly any task than a human?
In his most recent interview, Sam Altman suggests that with enough energy and compute, they are just one or two ideas away from something “kind of different.” That could just be good marketing from a charismatic CEO, as Julia Angwin argues in her latest essay for the New York Times.
But while Angwin has an incredible record as an investigative journalist, I suspect this essay will age poorly. Steve Levy compares it to Clifford Stoll’s infamous 1995 essay in Newsweek where he declared the internet to be “a passing fad, scoffing at predictions that one day we would book airline tickets, make restaurant reservations, and read news online:”
We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn't—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Fast forwarding to today, Levy writes that “It's time to believe the AI hype.” If you’re still a skeptic, my assumption is that you’ve spent less than ten hours with ChatGPT.4
Every week, I find new uses for the robots. It’s as if I’m suddenly a billionaire with every kind of personal expert at my beck and call: a therapist, professional coach, assistant, cycling coach, creative coach, financial advisor, programming instructor, stylist, marriage counselor, doctor, Excel analyst, friendship counselor, lawyer, reference librarian, nutritionist, gym trainer, editor, research assistant. I’m embarrassed to admit how much value I get from each of my expert assistants every week, but I anticipate it will become a normie confession soon enough.
For now, AI enhances my offline life. Put another way, I’m using AI rather than AI using me. But I’m not optimistic about the future. I expect that by 2030 we’ll be well on our way to a Ready Player One world, isolated in simulated versions of our idealized realities.
The characters in Her, Wall-E, and Ready Player One eventually learn to value what
poetically describes as the stuff of a well-lived life. Hopefully, we will too. I’m looking forward to opening the time capsule in 20 years to see how it all played out.🤔 Six provocative pieces
As I explore getting involved in a new public policy program at a local university here in Oaxaca, I’ve been thinking a lot about how universities make decisions. Here are some recent pieces that have caught my eye:
:Elite private colleges are both hotbeds of left-wing radicalism and are places of incredible wealth and privilege and have abandoned many of the rigorous academic standards and core principles like free speech that got them there in the first place. Leftists and liberals and conservatives all have reasons to regard them with suspicion, even as being a little cringe.
I expect hiring managers to look at two resumes — say, one from a recent graduate of Columbia, and one from a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina — and potentially see advantages for the UNC student. They’ll regard the Columbia grad as more likely to be coddled; more likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work; more likely to have benefited from grade inflation and perhaps dubious admissions policies.
No One Knows What Universities Are For by Derek Thompson:
“For example, what is UCLA’s mission? Research? Undergraduate teaching? Graduate teaching? Health care? Patents? Development? For a slightly simpler question, what about individual faculty? When I get back to my office, what should I spend my time on: my next article, editing my lecture notes, doing a peer review, doing service, or advancing diversity? Who knows.”
Higher Education Is Headed in the Wrong Direction by Tyler Cowen:
I also am hearing more academics — especially women — question whether they should be in the academy at all. They feel poorly treated, and the tenure clock remains in conflict with the biological clock. Bureaucratization is eating away at the free time of professors. Much of the glamour of the job is gone, and my fear is that the system increasingly attracts conformists.
The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia by
:Weird Nerds are distinguished by their unyielding devotion to Truth, often placing it above social graces or conventional norms. in The Weird Nerd’s place, I have noticed the proliferation of a different type of species in academia: what I call The Failed Corporatist. This is someone who stumbles upon academia not so much out of a love for The Truth, as due to an inability to thrive in corporate settings for various other, unrelated reasons. But the Failed Corporatist has a very conventional, corporate-like mindset anyway. It usually loves process, admin and adding more admin and adding more process and METRICS and social conformity.
I Teach a Class on Free Speech. My Students Can Show Us the Way Forward by Sophia Rosenfeld:
If we think of the university as a training ground for imagining a better world — whether from a left, right, center or altogether different perspective — then a very wide latitude for speech is essential as well. Any position that has political salience in today’s discourse should be sayable on campus, whether formally moderated in a classroom or screamed on the quad.
How To Overhaul Higher Education by
:Some years ago, I found myself at Berkeley with some time to kill. And then I thought: this place looks like Harvard or Yale, it's every bit as good, but there is a fundamental difference. We built this, not the rich. The citizens of California built it: for themselves, for each other, for their children. Public purposes, public goods, public benefits, public access. That is the spirit that animated a system that, for over a century, led the world. And that is the spirit we need to begin by reviving.
Have a lovely week,
David
There is no better commentary on how humans have adjusted to air travel than Louis CK’s Everything is Amazing & Nobody Is Happy.
I could give you many more fascinating stories of innovations that came sooner or later than expected, or you could ask ChatGPT, which is what I did. My favorite was the barcode scanner, which turns 50 this week, and was only widely adopted by stores 30 years after the invention of the barcode.
It seems obviously wrong now, but it was the correct observation about Apple’s first attempt at a similar device, the Newton, and all the copycats that followed.
This post echoes touches on the exact two themes that animated a conversation with a colleague yesterday — AI and the future of universities. Good timing. On AI, I’d be so curious to hear your go-to tools and uses right now (or maybe you’ve covered this in another post?). I feel utterly behind-the-curve.
So I recently watched this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uC1PA2PVbE] about the 'truth' about flight MH370 in which they talk about the potential and very likely possibility of super advanced technology that exists beyond our (aka general public) knowledge. It's worth a full undivided watch/listen - I've been thinking about all kinds of potential technologies that are just beyond our horizon.. the kinda stuff to keep you on the toilet longer than you need to be.