The coming productivity boom
AI and other digital technologies have been surprisingly slow to improve economic growth. But that could be about to change.
«Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since 2006, less than half the rate of the previous decade.»
More from MIT Technology Review
How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation
The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
«Scammers used to make their $$ from naive people. Now they get their payments straight from some of the world's biggest tech companies.»
Meta has built a massive new language AI—and it’s giving it away for free
Facebook’s parent company is inviting researchers to pore over and pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3
Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging
The oil kingdom fears that its population is aging at an accelerated rate and hopes to test drugs to reverse the problem. First up might be the diabetes drug metformin.
Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth
In a first, a patient in New Zealand has undergone gene-editing to lower their cholesterol. It could be the beginning of new era in disease prevention.
Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem
Companies already have the systems in place that are needed to evaluate their deeper impacts on the social fabric.
«Facebook’s 2012 “emotional contagion” experiment, which showed that users’ affect (their mood as measured by their behavior on the platform) shifted measurably depending on which version of the product they were exposed to»
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Endless Uncertainty
The night before the D-Day invasion, a nervous Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next. “To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at…
«The future is always endlessly unpredictable. What changes isn’t the level of uncertainty, but the level of people’s complacency.»
Where does the wealth go when asset prices go down?
It vanishes into nothingness.
«The short answer is: It didn’t “go” anywhere. It vanished. It stopped existing. That’s not a natural or intuitive idea — how can wealth just disappear? —»
Little Ways The World Works
If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and…
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