🔮 Inequality; the artificial in AI; African leapfrogging; why blockchain is hard; botnets, corvids & ethics++ #166

Dept of the near future

🌡️ Inequality is back. The 9.9% is the "new American aristocracy".Intergenerational wealth movement in the US is lower than almost every developed country. I’ve argued elsewhere that one curious side-effect of better mobility (digital and physical) can result in stronger trends towards assortative mating and homophily which may also result in socioeconomic gridlock. (Elsewhere, the new World Inequality Report notes that inequality is rising in nearly every part of the globe. Much of this is driven by greater privately-owned capital and the concentration of that ownership.)

🔒 On technology, politics and globalism: territorial data regulations are diverging with more governments requiring local storage of data. The number of nations implementing these intra fauces terra has tripled since 2016 to 84. Some estimates suggest it might reduce national GDP by 3.4%. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, authoritarian regimes fiddle their GDP growth statistics significantly, new sate…