🔮 The Sunday edition #512: humans + synths; Grok 3, the UK vs Apple; fusion records & avoiding CCP censorship++

An insider’s guide to AI and exponential technologies

Hi, it’s Azeem.

Conventional wisdom has it that declining global population spells economic doom. But what if we’re asking the wrong question entirely? Kevin Kelly argues that we’re witnessing a profound shift from the economy of the Born to the economy of the Made. This week’s developments make his case: AI agents are changing drug discovery and cracking the code of life. In the meantime, Apple responds to a stupid British government request. Let’s dig deeper.

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An economy of busy synthetics and chillaxing humans

Kevin Kelly

published a fantastic essay this week on the transition from an economy of the Born to the economy of the Made as a response to the declining population rates globally – and the increasing capability of our AI and robotic systems.

Kelly argues that the future economy must decouple growth from sheer numerical expansion and instead define it in terms of qualitative improvement, innovation and maturity. With fewer humans participating in the workforce and marketplace, AI, robots and autonomous agents will assume both productive and consumptive roles. 

The economy of the Born is powered by human attention, human desires, human biases, human labor, human attitudes, human consumption. The economy of the Made, a synthetic economy, is powered by artificial minds, machine attention, synthetic labor, virtual needs and manufactured desires. [...] We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. 

The essay is worth reading in full. Make it your top weekend reading.  

See also: 

• The new “SWE-Lancer” benchmark tested AI models on a range of real Upwork tasks, ranging from $50 bug fixes to $32,000 feature implementations. The top-performing model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, earned $400,000 out of a possible $1 million worth of tasks, automating about 40% of real software development end to end.

Britain’s encryption misadventure

Apple will scrap its highly secure end-to-end encryption (E2EE) system for iCloud for users in the UK after the government used a particularly heavy-handed piece of legislation to insist on backdoor access to the data. The bizarre requirement was also “extraterritorial […] meaning UK law enforcement would have been able to access the encrypted iCloud data of Apple customers anywhere in the world.”¹

In a digital world, encryption only protects economies, financial markets and individual liberty if it’s airtight. It must be uncompromised. The SaltTyphoon breach proves it: Chinese agents were able to access a government mandated backdoor to conduct mass surveillance on US telecoms networks, snagging call records, location data, and even private conversations.

Backdoors don’t discriminate between “good guys” and bad actors—once they’re there, they’re a liability.

Signal President Meredith Whittaker nails it in her statement:

You can’t be tech friendly while eroding the foundation of cybersecurity on which robust tech depends. Encryption is not a luxury - it is a fundamental human right essential to a free society that also happens to underpin the global economy.

Worth reading the full remarks with comments from tech investor,

Steve Jurvetson

here.

Sure, bad actors exploit E2EE when it’s available. But security services have plenty of other tools—payment tracking, bulk metadata collection, GPS monitoring and other techniques to hunt them down without torching encryption for everyone else. Weakened E2EE stifles innovation, spooks investors, and hands adversaries a playbook to exploit. In short: breaking E2EE imposes steeper societal costs than preserving it and relying on those alternatives to hold off the bad guys.

Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK’s National Cybersecurity Centre, gets it. In a letter urging the government to back off Apple:

E2EE [end-to-end encryption] must expand, legally unfettered, for the betterment of our digital homeland.

The irony, as

Pessimists Archive

points out, is that Britain’s spies invented public key cryptography, the basis of modern day encryption, seven years before Stanford University researchers independently conjured it up.

Today, the British government’s move is completely misaligned with the nation’s stated values. It is regulatory overreach which cedes ground to less scrupulous regimes. And it destroys a fundamental capability that vibrant, innovative and growing economies need in the 21st century.

Grok 3 has the crown(ish)