Dear Sam

We need big and deep thinkers with bold ideas

I used Suno to create a theme song for this newsletter. You can download the MP3 to see how limited my creative skills are, even when using advanced AI.

The lyrics are mine and include the following:

[Verse]

That Was The Week No time to be Meek The goal is to Seek The Next Big Thing [

[Chorus]

That Was The Week That Was The Week Stand Back Think Big Dig Deep That Was The Week

I'm starting with this in honor of the essay of the week written by Rohit Krishnan - "Whither Utopia". Rohit charts the rise of utopian ideas (before that was a pejorative term), and the fall of utopian thinking. Toward the end of the essay he states:

Instead of grand narratives the focus became on micro narratives, skepticism of rational progress, and, perhaps consequently, a reliance on technology to be the answer.

Micro narratives pervade technology today, while macro narratives are frowned upon or described as dangerous. OpenAI has become a magnet for hostility to big ideas and transformative technologies.

Rohit points out that technology may have obviated the need for large social thinking about organizing the world. I think that may be a temporal anomaly. As AI improves productivity and frees humans to have more leisure time (in the negative lexicon, "eats jobs"), the macro narrative around wealth distribution is likely to raise its head loudly.

So the theme this week is "Stand Back, Think Big, Dig Deep."

It seems very likely that AI, or at least the LLM version we are experiencing now, will remove hours and hours of monotonous work from many humans each week. It seems very likely that the world will become cleverer as Apple introduces AI to the iPhone in Junes WWDC, and Android follows suit. Billions of us will have a ready-made, multi-skilled assistant. Increasingly, it will be able to carry out tasks and report results. It also seems likely that physical beings running computers with this AI embedded, will be capable of real-world tasks. And it seems likely that we will be able to raise science to a new level, as the Chinese diabetes technology reported below demonstrates. Oh, and the entire world will have access to these new skills and tools. The trend will be towards them being free.

We are on the verge of an era of enormous advancement in what we can collectively do.

So, this is not a time for fear, complaints, or accusations. it is a time to get stuff done.

PWC adopting ChatGPT and Apple reportedly doing so are early signals of a new technical revolution.

China's $47 billion semiconductor fund (see below) will undoubtedly be able to leverage AI to make advanced semiconductors faster than we made the first ones.

The new world will challenge all of today's institutions and require new social arrangements, both globally and locally, as the earth flattens from an economic and demographic point of view and human demands regarding work are reduced.

You can't have rapid technical shits without equally dramatic social shits. Rohit's historical survey of utopian thinkers demonstrates that all greatly impacted how societies evolved. This generation needs to ask some big questions, dig deep for answers, and do so from an overview of where we are and where we want to go.

Essays of the Week