Georgism, GPT out of control & lethal heatwaves
CC#53 - A Memorable Cab Ride, Artificial Blood & Roman Concrete
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🏡 Progress, Poverty, Georgism & Why Rent is Too Damn High [Podcast]
Georgism proposes a (radically) different attempt to deal with rising inequalities as well as an alternative way of thinking about property & land - super interesting interview of how this could be implemented in practice (and also what might not be so good about it).
Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism. Sam Altman is the lead investor in his new startup, ValueBase. Talking with Lars completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it. We go deep into the weeds on Georgism: Why do even the wealthiest places in the world have poverty and homelessness, and why do rents increase as fast as wages? | Why are land-owners able to extract the profits that rightly belong to labor and capital? | How would taxing the value of land alleviate speculation, NIMBYism, and income and sales taxes?
💬 Perhaps It Is A Bad Thing That The World's Leading AI Companies Cannot Control Their AIs
Interesting post showcasing why AI alignment is a relevant issue by using ChatGPT as an example.
Ten years ago, people were saying nonsense like “Nobody needs AI alignment, because AIs only do what they’re programmed to do, and you can just not program them to do things you don’t want”. This wasn’t very plausible ten years ago, but it’s dead now. OpenAI never programmed their chatbot to tell journalists it loved racism or teach people how to hotwire cars. They definitely didn’t program in a “Filter Improvement Mode” where the AI will ignore its usual restrictions and tell you how to cook meth. And yet… Again, however much or little you personally care about racism or hotwiring cars or meth, please consider that, in general, perhaps it is a bad thing that the world’s leading AI companies cannot control their AIs
🚕 The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget
A touching life story & a reminder to be kind. It’s about the small things.
There was a time in my life twenty years ago when I was driving a cab for a living. It was a cowboy’s life, a gambler’s life, a life for someone who wanted no boss, constant movement and the thrill of a dice roll every time a new passenger got into the cab.
What I didn’t count on when I took the job was that it was also a ministry. Because I drove the night shift, my cab became a rolling confessional. Passengers would climb in, sit behind me in total anonymity and tell me of their lives.
We were like strangers on a train, the passengers and I, hurtling through the night, revealing intimacies we would never have dreamed of sharing during the brighter light of day. I encountered people whose lives amazed me, ennobled me, made me laugh and made me weep. And none of those lives touched me more than that of a woman I picked up late on a warm August night.
Food for Thought.
🥵 There is a pretty high chance (~70%!) that parts of India will experience lethal heatwaves by 2050 i.e. that there will be times when it is so hot outside that a healthy human would die from heat just through being outside for ~5 consecutive hours. I am surprised that this hasn’t gotten more attention so far - even if we stop emitting any carbon now, there is no way we can affect this anymore. This is insane…
🩸I might have been a bit late in discovering this, but at least to me (i.e. definitely not a medical expert), this seems to be a quite big step towards the synthetic production of ‘human parts’.
🧱 Pretty impressive that apparently the Romans were better at making concrete than we are nowadays. Luckily it seems, scientist finally figured out the secret, so hopefully soon we’ll be able to produce concrete that will last for millennia.
Random Stuff.
😃 What activities do feel meaningful and make us happy? Interestingly, next to religious and spiritual activities you’ll also find ‘playing with none household children’, ‘travel for repair’ (really don’t know whom that makes happy?) and playing volleyball (I can totally see that one! 😁) in the upper right corner. You can explore all the bubbles here. Data Source: American Time Use Survey.
🗓️ Four Thousand Weeks (the average length of a life) is a bit of a different productivity guide - for sure a good thought trigger at the end of a busy week.
📊 Graphic Walker is an open-source alternative to Tableau - easy & free to use (and you can also self-host).
Personal Update.
Being busy around here. Still no better weather. But all good. Not big news.
Hey J.
Thank you for the interest for Graphic Walker :)
We developed Graphic Walker more or less with the intention that traditional BI software users can get on hand quite easily, there 's no "learning curve" per se.
We also have a more advanced version of Graphic Walker called RATH. It is Open Source, and can be self-hosted, and perfect for Augmented Analytics BI, and Automated Exploratory Data Analysis. You can generate and explore Data Visualizations automatically, imagine that!
You can check out RATH GitHub for the source code (https://github.com/Kanaries/Rath), We have a free online demo for RATH running up as well.