In terms of actual subscriptions, it is a curious group, including:
* Financial Times
* Times (London)
* New York Times
* Wall Street Journal
* Washington Post
* Foreign Policy
* Foreign Affairs
* Nature
* The Economist
* Harvard Business Review
* London Review of Books
* Science
* All the twitter feeds/google alerts
I also keep track of academic papers across disciplines using a couple of proprietary search engines, PapersWithCode, Arxiv, ScienceDirect, AlDaily, SSRN, as well.
Much of building the world view comes from my day jobs, which involves working to entrepreneurs, investors & policymakers.
Yes - this is a great one. I recently spent some time with Profesorr De Kai Wu of Hong Kong University. This was followed up by a panel, which I was on, alongside three Chinese academics looking at different elements of the Chinese approach to ethics in AI and robotics.
One critical distinction is that the West tends to focus on individual privacy, accountability, fairness and transparency. These are what I call "UN Declaration of Human Rights"-style values. And they also come from our philosophical heritage.
In the work on AI ethics coming ut of China, these aspects are not stressed as much (or stressed in different ways). And there are elements of the work that relate to collective behaviours and values, as well as notions of social harmony. Some of these are influenced by the long and conflicting philosophical and cultural traditions in China, which blend Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.
There are still important moral differences. Not just between the West and China, but across other parts of the globe which we will need to contend with.
In Azeem's conversation with Kai-Fu Lee on our podcast, it was interesting how Kai-fu characterized Chinese approach as techno-utilitarianism 'which is believing that letting technologies launch earlier and then figuring out if they need to be regulated later.' Summary of these points is here + the link to the conversation https://medium.com/@azeem/chinas-ai-advantage-a396ac747ccc :)
Have to get a meeting at 10am EST, so I'll miss this, but wanted to ask: You recently switch your electricity to a plan based on renewable energy. That encouraged to me check my local power company and sign up for their Green Energy Power Plan which guarantees the purchase of renewal energy or carbon offsets based on my usage. Is it possible for a massive consumer push towards utilizing these services to help change the game in energy investment, and would this be a positive "what you can do" action for everyday people to drive the industry towards adoption faster? Are there drawbacks?
The received wisdom is that only coordinated government action can make a difference. Governments take action on the basis of citizen activity. So I do think that individual decisions, e.g. the switch to renewable power provider or hold off buying a diesel car, transmit some form of political will.
If, for example, the fastest growing energy providers are all green providers, that tells politicians something.
The other significant effect is that consumer spending will increase investment in a sector. This should lead to scale-effects (lower pricing) and investment in innovation in those sectors.
In other words, personal action, especially when coordinated, can help. (Some caveats apply.)
I don't know about the US, but I think there's an additional challenge in the UK of getting the average consumer to get a Smart Meter (fear of surveillance, data sharing, not actually understanding its true purpose etc). The more data, the more the grid can be optimised which may lead to lower energy prices. We're currently 'playing' with an agile (to 30 minutes, known 48 hours in advance) tarrif, my forecast is a 20 percent saving.
I've not seeing data on fear of smart meters so I can't comment on that. We don't have one because roll out is slow.
However, you can move fully renewable without one. I've switched to Bulb energy which I recommend. (They have a special deal for EV readers here: https://azm.io/2JQ1qLC )
How did you come up with the idea of creating EV as a virtual community? And what are your future plans for it? Do you have any ideal scenario in mind about its structure and dynamics?
What is your opinion in how Open World (US, UK, Australia, India, EU, Japan, South Korea etc.) should treat Chinese tech ambitions? In terms of allowing Huawei sell smartphones, build 5g? Owning 100% of TikTok, Grindr and 10% reddit, N26, Snapchat etc. Is the best to limit Open World usage of Chinese products, like China limit Open World products (FANG, Twitter, Uber, Spotify, Skype etc.) within their borders? Since China play long-term​ and don't follow our rules of trustable discourse, open markets, IP protection, cyber-security - why should we continue allowing their tech-products (largely developed through spying-operations) in Open World?
I expect that most effective will be a dose of genuine realpolitik. The idea of "Open World" and "non-Open World" is another false binary.
First of all, the "Open World" also engages in practices that are probably not suitable for the exponential world. One example if the multi-decadal nature of regulatory capture which has created absurdly tough IP laws (especially around copyright) that cannot be justified on any economic basis.
The regulatory capture has meant that 75 year plus copyright is now "part of the open-world" when it is just a case of semi-malevolent actors taking control of the laws.
Secondly, China is here and here to stay. So figuring out how to accommodate it is critical. I challenge the idea of the lack of "trustable discourse" coming out of China. This for at least two reasons. The first is that there needs to be some trust within China otherwise its own system will not work. The second is that China is not a monolith, but is chaotic, fractal, energetic.
Thirdly, China is not the only emerging power in this mulitpolar world. Russia is proving to have some life left in it. India and parts of Africa will soon weigh in. On a population basis alone, Indonesia will be a force to contend within 20 years. (See my podcast discusion with Parag Khanna on this point.)
Honestly, I'm not sure if, in the scope of the challenges ahead of us, it matters whether Chinese investors own 10% of Reddit.
What does matter is establishing new ground-rules for a highly fragemented battlespace where our attack surfaces have multipled and the cost of launch direct or indirect operations ranging from kinetic to information has dropped. In this environment we'll need to work hell for leather to establish rules of proportionate response, reciprocity and so on. I'll be discussing this in a podcast we are releasing in the Fall.
I get the sense in your podcast you're rarely holding China accountable for the mistakes they've made. Sure, past is the past - but they continue doing so. Thats why I asked this question, and I find again you on the position of defending China.
Indeed any part of the world is far from open. I guess you could frame the battle as Liberal Democracies (fairly distributed (US, India, Japan, EU, South Korea etc.) vs Authoritarian regimes, led by China (also Russia, UAE).
Limiting the question to purely economical power, why should Liberal Democracies freely allow Chinese consumer-products (apps, or goods) on our market, while most (ex. Starbucks vs Luckin coffee, or Uber, eBay (not mention FANG)) being pushed out from China?
Anyways, time's out on AMA now, but I hope you can be a bit tougher on China's human rights & economic abuses in the future.
Good Day Azeem - what are the issues you think should be discussed/debated in the upcoming US Primaries (or any country's elections for that matter) that aren't getting sufficient attention?
The hardest thing that isn't being discussed is systemic change. If the current technologically-driven changes are so dramatic, and they are doing to change "the system" (the way the printing press did), then should we explore that? Those questions don't play well politically!
So more prosaically, we need to talk about three things first and foremost:
1. How do we deal with the climate breakdown? How do we take pragmatic and evidence-based steps to decarbonise our economy, be honest about what that will mean with our current economic framing, stare vested interests in the eye, start to prepare mitigations (including dealing with the largest ever human migrations in history?)
2. How do we talk honestly about the transition period to a new economy? How should we share the proceeds of the gains? And how should we make the transition bearable? Economics, as I discussed with Brian Arthur, needs to consider distributional consequences. (Look out for my discussion with Carlota Perez in a few weeks, or Eric Beinhocker's new book later this week. Also, listen to my podcast with Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang.)
3. How do we create a sense of personal comfort and emotional resilience with this slew of changes occurring in the system? Premium members may have enjoyed the briefing with Karen Stenner where we explored the challenging consequences of normative threat (often catalysed by technology) -- so one critical thing politicians need to own up to is that our political-economic settlement, the substrate in which we live, is changing.
Thank you for the very thoughtful response! Overall, I think the large challenge we have for all of these topics are short attention spans - from our politicians, media and voters.
On Climate Change, now that people are starting to "feel" the change, perhaps they'll be open to a more robust meaningful discussions. Next challenge, in my mind, is who'll pay for retrofitting factories/cars/etc in developing markets...will other countries be willing to help fund for the sake of our shared planet?
On the transition and some of the more existential challenges, while we have candidates like Yang who understand the challenges (and potential solutions), their biggest problem will be editing their insights down into digestible messages for the average politician/journalist/voter. In the US, while I doubt such individuals will be electable, they'd be ideal in Cabinet positions...
Politicians are responsive though. So having the debate, creating the terms of art, can effect change. Yang is brilliant in calling his UBI the "Freedom Dividend". WHo doesn't want Freedom? Who doesn't want a Dividend?
Struck by the contrast between the words you use..."pragmatic, evidence based; talk honestly; sense of personal comfort and emotional resilience"...and our current state of theatrical, emotion-driven political rhetoric. The dissolution of the notion of "facts" makes your approach to all these crucial topics difficult to imagine. Not that your approach isn't on point, just that it's going to take something of a reboot to get from here to there, I fear.
Facial recognition - though a heinously broad/complex topic, what's your core view/projection on benefits, areas of value, risk - personal, societal, policy etc.
It seems reasonable to slow this down. My colleagues at the Ada Lovelace Foundation have proposed a moratorium in some cases.
These novel technologies will come out and create harm until we step in and create particular frameworks and rules that protect us. So like any new technology, it's important to establish those guardrails. If we do it too quuickly, we are likely to snuff out the technology. So the question is how to we find the appropriate pace to discover those rules? Any ideas?
I would suggest a similar approach to how some cities have approached autonomous vehicles: enabled them to be tested under very specific conditions.
I would add more scrutiny by legislating for the data gathered to be made open, and increase public money invested in the development of it, this may not only speed up the improvements of the technology but also help ensure that the resulting benefits are not unfairly skewed towards the corporations, the infrastructure of facial recognition technology should be a public good, and private companies can be rewarded for created add value on top of that.
I would mimic Estonia, in having the citizens own their own data, e.g. open my government app and I can see where my face was last recognised, who has been accessing the digital copy of my recognition etc.
What's your take on capitalism and measuring success by / optimizing for growth in corporate revenue and GDP? Do you think this will allow us to solve humanity's challenges like climate change or AI ethics? What could be an alternative?
Yeah - the GDP optimisation across an economy is a problem. Although I am not sure that I necessarily want today's corporations to establish what the boundaries of appropriate action are.
However, the profit motive is a powerful one. And I think we'll make a lot of progress on climate change in the short term by creating investment incentives for firms to get involved in that sector.
Long-term this might involve alt-measures of "GDP" or the purpose of the economy (see, Brynjolffson's work on GDP-B; or Beinhocker's forthcoming book) but in the short-term we could do a lot by including full life-cycle impacts (e.g. waste,and pollution) into pricing.
I used to be optimistic about democracy, tech, and such. But with climate catastrophe only a decade or maybe 20 years (if we are lucky) away, I find it difficult to image anything but a dystopian outcome for humans. Azeem, how do you see the trend for humanity? Will the need for survival in a unraveling economic, political, and agricultural superstructure (because of climate shifts, etc.) bring about a sudden break in how humans govern themselves. Will we fall back to tribal living structures, or will there be some kind of techno leap to a human-cyber type of existence either with a smaller Earth population, or maybe the Jeff Bezos vision of mostly an off-world "human" existence where infinite expansion can be realized?
Robert Reich suggests that free market vs regulated market debate opaques the reality: Government creates the rules required for a market to operate (what can be bought/sold, what contracts are enforceable, who can declare bankruptcy and when etc.). He further asserts that for the last few decades, these rules have been bent towards the richest corporations, over protecting individuals and small businesses.
To what extent do you think this is the case in the UK, and how do you see it playing out with automation technologies in the next few decades (aka will power consolidate even more as more processes automated and less people required, or will the increased tracking & measuring of tasks/processes mean it is easier for fairer outcomes to be implemented).
It is skewed to larger corporations in a clear case of regulatory capture. But its also the case that large corporations have been able to do two things smaller corps can't:
1. Scale things out (thus increasing access to the bounty of the market)
2. Invest in hard things (which they have been doing with decreasing success, see for example constipation in the big pharma drugs pipeline.)
Many existing large firms will disappear or become less important in the economy as we go through the current transition. During this transition, we should ensure we learn from our recent experience around regulatory capture, distributional consequences of "trickle-down thinking" and the power of incumbency to ensure we can have a more entrepreneurial, inclusive and adaptive economy.
We spend so much time talking about the "rapid pace of technological change" as though it's an inevitable fact, but we don't often talk about the drivers which make it so rapid (competition being one of the biggest), who contributes to accelerating it and how or if we should find a way to slow it down. What do you think?
Thank you. That was fun. If you enjoyed this, hit the like button! ;)
Perhaps we can start light: Azeem, what IS your most memorable podcasting moment??
Which other newsletters / publications do you subscribe to?
Hi,
I wrote up how I handle content on a daily basis. You can find the details here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-built-high-performance-curation-engine-azeem-azhar/
In terms of actual subscriptions, it is a curious group, including:
* Financial Times
* Times (London)
* New York Times
* Wall Street Journal
* Washington Post
* Foreign Policy
* Foreign Affairs
* Nature
* The Economist
* Harvard Business Review
* London Review of Books
* Science
* All the twitter feeds/google alerts
I also keep track of academic papers across disciplines using a couple of proprietary search engines, PapersWithCode, Arxiv, ScienceDirect, AlDaily, SSRN, as well.
Much of building the world view comes from my day jobs, which involves working to entrepreneurs, investors & policymakers.
Don't forget to add differences between Eastern and Western reactions to robots to the AI ethics conversation!
Yes - this is a great one. I recently spent some time with Profesorr De Kai Wu of Hong Kong University. This was followed up by a panel, which I was on, alongside three Chinese academics looking at different elements of the Chinese approach to ethics in AI and robotics.
One critical distinction is that the West tends to focus on individual privacy, accountability, fairness and transparency. These are what I call "UN Declaration of Human Rights"-style values. And they also come from our philosophical heritage.
In the work on AI ethics coming ut of China, these aspects are not stressed as much (or stressed in different ways). And there are elements of the work that relate to collective behaviours and values, as well as notions of social harmony. Some of these are influenced by the long and conflicting philosophical and cultural traditions in China, which blend Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.
There are still important moral differences. Not just between the West and China, but across other parts of the globe which we will need to contend with.
In Azeem's conversation with Kai-Fu Lee on our podcast, it was interesting how Kai-fu characterized Chinese approach as techno-utilitarianism 'which is believing that letting technologies launch earlier and then figuring out if they need to be regulated later.' Summary of these points is here + the link to the conversation https://medium.com/@azeem/chinas-ai-advantage-a396ac747ccc :)
Thanks for the link.
Thanks! Would love to discuss this with you on my RoboPsych Podcast.
Here's our Apple Podcasts link https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/robopsych-podcast/id959304430
I'll give it a listen today! Thanks!
Any particular episode you'd recommend to start with?
I'd also suggest this one with Paul Pangaro https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-81-dr-paul-pangaro-on-designing-interactions/id959304430?i=1000439980137
This conversation with Brian Roemmele is very interesting. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-77-brian-roemmele-the-last-interface/id959304430?i=1000430900232
Just subscribed :)
Welcome!
Have to get a meeting at 10am EST, so I'll miss this, but wanted to ask: You recently switch your electricity to a plan based on renewable energy. That encouraged to me check my local power company and sign up for their Green Energy Power Plan which guarantees the purchase of renewal energy or carbon offsets based on my usage. Is it possible for a massive consumer push towards utilizing these services to help change the game in energy investment, and would this be a positive "what you can do" action for everyday people to drive the industry towards adoption faster? Are there drawbacks?
The received wisdom is that only coordinated government action can make a difference. Governments take action on the basis of citizen activity. So I do think that individual decisions, e.g. the switch to renewable power provider or hold off buying a diesel car, transmit some form of political will.
If, for example, the fastest growing energy providers are all green providers, that tells politicians something.
The other significant effect is that consumer spending will increase investment in a sector. This should lead to scale-effects (lower pricing) and investment in innovation in those sectors.
In other words, personal action, especially when coordinated, can help. (Some caveats apply.)
I don't know about the US, but I think there's an additional challenge in the UK of getting the average consumer to get a Smart Meter (fear of surveillance, data sharing, not actually understanding its true purpose etc). The more data, the more the grid can be optimised which may lead to lower energy prices. We're currently 'playing' with an agile (to 30 minutes, known 48 hours in advance) tarrif, my forecast is a 20 percent saving.
I've not seeing data on fear of smart meters so I can't comment on that. We don't have one because roll out is slow.
However, you can move fully renewable without one. I've switched to Bulb energy which I recommend. (They have a special deal for EV readers here: https://azm.io/2JQ1qLC )
How did you come up with the idea of creating EV as a virtual community? And what are your future plans for it? Do you have any ideal scenario in mind about its structure and dynamics?
I wish there was a plan! We're just filling this jar one jelly bean at a time.
Nice!
Hi Azeem,
What is your opinion in how Open World (US, UK, Australia, India, EU, Japan, South Korea etc.) should treat Chinese tech ambitions? In terms of allowing Huawei sell smartphones, build 5g? Owning 100% of TikTok, Grindr and 10% reddit, N26, Snapchat etc. Is the best to limit Open World usage of Chinese products, like China limit Open World products (FANG, Twitter, Uber, Spotify, Skype etc.) within their borders? Since China play long-term​ and don't follow our rules of trustable discourse, open markets, IP protection, cyber-security - why should we continue allowing their tech-products (largely developed through spying-operations) in Open World?
I expect that most effective will be a dose of genuine realpolitik. The idea of "Open World" and "non-Open World" is another false binary.
First of all, the "Open World" also engages in practices that are probably not suitable for the exponential world. One example if the multi-decadal nature of regulatory capture which has created absurdly tough IP laws (especially around copyright) that cannot be justified on any economic basis.
The regulatory capture has meant that 75 year plus copyright is now "part of the open-world" when it is just a case of semi-malevolent actors taking control of the laws.
Secondly, China is here and here to stay. So figuring out how to accommodate it is critical. I challenge the idea of the lack of "trustable discourse" coming out of China. This for at least two reasons. The first is that there needs to be some trust within China otherwise its own system will not work. The second is that China is not a monolith, but is chaotic, fractal, energetic.
Thirdly, China is not the only emerging power in this mulitpolar world. Russia is proving to have some life left in it. India and parts of Africa will soon weigh in. On a population basis alone, Indonesia will be a force to contend within 20 years. (See my podcast discusion with Parag Khanna on this point.)
Honestly, I'm not sure if, in the scope of the challenges ahead of us, it matters whether Chinese investors own 10% of Reddit.
What does matter is establishing new ground-rules for a highly fragemented battlespace where our attack surfaces have multipled and the cost of launch direct or indirect operations ranging from kinetic to information has dropped. In this environment we'll need to work hell for leather to establish rules of proportionate response, reciprocity and so on. I'll be discussing this in a podcast we are releasing in the Fall.
Pragmatism (realpolitik) by all means.
I get the sense in your podcast you're rarely holding China accountable for the mistakes they've made. Sure, past is the past - but they continue doing so. Thats why I asked this question, and I find again you on the position of defending China.
Indeed any part of the world is far from open. I guess you could frame the battle as Liberal Democracies (fairly distributed (US, India, Japan, EU, South Korea etc.) vs Authoritarian regimes, led by China (also Russia, UAE).
Limiting the question to purely economical power, why should Liberal Democracies freely allow Chinese consumer-products (apps, or goods) on our market, while most (ex. Starbucks vs Luckin coffee, or Uber, eBay (not mention FANG)) being pushed out from China?
Anyways, time's out on AMA now, but I hope you can be a bit tougher on China's human rights & economic abuses in the future.
Good Day Azeem - what are the issues you think should be discussed/debated in the upcoming US Primaries (or any country's elections for that matter) that aren't getting sufficient attention?
Caveat: not following the primaries closely.
The hardest thing that isn't being discussed is systemic change. If the current technologically-driven changes are so dramatic, and they are doing to change "the system" (the way the printing press did), then should we explore that? Those questions don't play well politically!
So more prosaically, we need to talk about three things first and foremost:
1. How do we deal with the climate breakdown? How do we take pragmatic and evidence-based steps to decarbonise our economy, be honest about what that will mean with our current economic framing, stare vested interests in the eye, start to prepare mitigations (including dealing with the largest ever human migrations in history?)
2. How do we talk honestly about the transition period to a new economy? How should we share the proceeds of the gains? And how should we make the transition bearable? Economics, as I discussed with Brian Arthur, needs to consider distributional consequences. (Look out for my discussion with Carlota Perez in a few weeks, or Eric Beinhocker's new book later this week. Also, listen to my podcast with Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang.)
3. How do we create a sense of personal comfort and emotional resilience with this slew of changes occurring in the system? Premium members may have enjoyed the briefing with Karen Stenner where we explored the challenging consequences of normative threat (often catalysed by technology) -- so one critical thing politicians need to own up to is that our political-economic settlement, the substrate in which we live, is changing.
What do you think?
Thank you for the very thoughtful response! Overall, I think the large challenge we have for all of these topics are short attention spans - from our politicians, media and voters.
On Climate Change, now that people are starting to "feel" the change, perhaps they'll be open to a more robust meaningful discussions. Next challenge, in my mind, is who'll pay for retrofitting factories/cars/etc in developing markets...will other countries be willing to help fund for the sake of our shared planet?
On the transition and some of the more existential challenges, while we have candidates like Yang who understand the challenges (and potential solutions), their biggest problem will be editing their insights down into digestible messages for the average politician/journalist/voter. In the US, while I doubt such individuals will be electable, they'd be ideal in Cabinet positions...
Politicians are responsive though. So having the debate, creating the terms of art, can effect change. Yang is brilliant in calling his UBI the "Freedom Dividend". WHo doesn't want Freedom? Who doesn't want a Dividend?
Struck by the contrast between the words you use..."pragmatic, evidence based; talk honestly; sense of personal comfort and emotional resilience"...and our current state of theatrical, emotion-driven political rhetoric. The dissolution of the notion of "facts" makes your approach to all these crucial topics difficult to imagine. Not that your approach isn't on point, just that it's going to take something of a reboot to get from here to there, I fear.
Facial recognition - though a heinously broad/complex topic, what's your core view/projection on benefits, areas of value, risk - personal, societal, policy etc.
It seems reasonable to slow this down. My colleagues at the Ada Lovelace Foundation have proposed a moratorium in some cases.
These novel technologies will come out and create harm until we step in and create particular frameworks and rules that protect us. So like any new technology, it's important to establish those guardrails. If we do it too quuickly, we are likely to snuff out the technology. So the question is how to we find the appropriate pace to discover those rules? Any ideas?
I would suggest a similar approach to how some cities have approached autonomous vehicles: enabled them to be tested under very specific conditions.
I would add more scrutiny by legislating for the data gathered to be made open, and increase public money invested in the development of it, this may not only speed up the improvements of the technology but also help ensure that the resulting benefits are not unfairly skewed towards the corporations, the infrastructure of facial recognition technology should be a public good, and private companies can be rewarded for created add value on top of that.
I would mimic Estonia, in having the citizens own their own data, e.g. open my government app and I can see where my face was last recognised, who has been accessing the digital copy of my recognition etc.
What's your take on capitalism and measuring success by / optimizing for growth in corporate revenue and GDP? Do you think this will allow us to solve humanity's challenges like climate change or AI ethics? What could be an alternative?
Yeah - the GDP optimisation across an economy is a problem. Although I am not sure that I necessarily want today's corporations to establish what the boundaries of appropriate action are.
However, the profit motive is a powerful one. And I think we'll make a lot of progress on climate change in the short term by creating investment incentives for firms to get involved in that sector.
Long-term this might involve alt-measures of "GDP" or the purpose of the economy (see, Brynjolffson's work on GDP-B; or Beinhocker's forthcoming book) but in the short-term we could do a lot by including full life-cycle impacts (e.g. waste,and pollution) into pricing.
I used to be optimistic about democracy, tech, and such. But with climate catastrophe only a decade or maybe 20 years (if we are lucky) away, I find it difficult to image anything but a dystopian outcome for humans. Azeem, how do you see the trend for humanity? Will the need for survival in a unraveling economic, political, and agricultural superstructure (because of climate shifts, etc.) bring about a sudden break in how humans govern themselves. Will we fall back to tribal living structures, or will there be some kind of techno leap to a human-cyber type of existence either with a smaller Earth population, or maybe the Jeff Bezos vision of mostly an off-world "human" existence where infinite expansion can be realized?
Robert Reich suggests that free market vs regulated market debate opaques the reality: Government creates the rules required for a market to operate (what can be bought/sold, what contracts are enforceable, who can declare bankruptcy and when etc.). He further asserts that for the last few decades, these rules have been bent towards the richest corporations, over protecting individuals and small businesses.
To what extent do you think this is the case in the UK, and how do you see it playing out with automation technologies in the next few decades (aka will power consolidate even more as more processes automated and less people required, or will the increased tracking & measuring of tasks/processes mean it is easier for fairer outcomes to be implemented).
It is skewed to larger corporations in a clear case of regulatory capture. But its also the case that large corporations have been able to do two things smaller corps can't:
1. Scale things out (thus increasing access to the bounty of the market)
2. Invest in hard things (which they have been doing with decreasing success, see for example constipation in the big pharma drugs pipeline.)
Many existing large firms will disappear or become less important in the economy as we go through the current transition. During this transition, we should ensure we learn from our recent experience around regulatory capture, distributional consequences of "trickle-down thinking" and the power of incumbency to ensure we can have a more entrepreneurial, inclusive and adaptive economy.
food for thought, thanks Azeem!
Where DID that 60GB of data from your thermostat go... ?
I actualyl don't know why it is so chatty. I meant to set-up Wireshark to sniff my network but haven't got round to it yet.
We spend so much time talking about the "rapid pace of technological change" as though it's an inevitable fact, but we don't often talk about the drivers which make it so rapid (competition being one of the biggest), who contributes to accelerating it and how or if we should find a way to slow it down. What do you think?