I have been blessed by the writing of Christians who have been actively engaged in discussions around AI policy, development and adoption.
As I reference in the column, over the past several weeks @msgwrites, @NateAFischer, and @RedemTheTimes have demonstrated great wisdom and prescient perspective that are worth wrestling with.
This is a starting point.
Bitter people often deprecate successful children of elite families as “nepo babies.”
A popular defense is to deny nepotism played a role and insist that they earned their success on their own. But the more important point is that such people often do enjoy significant advantages, and that this is a good thing.
Not only are many children from good families individually talented, they have often developed virtues particular to their class, and concern for a family reputation that makes them more dependable at ages where a self-made riser would have difficult proving something comparable. This multigenerational passing of credibility is important for multiple reasons, including having some younger people in positions of influence, and increasing societal trust.
The maligning of “nepotism”—including things that would have been recognized and good and just for most of human history—was just another front in the left’s broad attacks on the networks and institutions that preserve our civilization.
I assume it will come out soon enough, which company this is, and it will be interesting to note what incremental revenue, cost savings in other categories, or rapid product improvements could be tied to this half billion $ token spend.
Some people would rather we be ruled by disembodied algorithms than actual people with families and relationships.
In age of AI, this impulse will mean growing calls to hand decision-making to literal algorithms—to avoid all the messiness of human rule.
"Technology does not necessarily have to compete with family, faith, or human connection. In an unexpected twist, it may end up strengthening them, especially for the women who have borne the hidden costs of this new labor market of the last sixty years."
Read @dylanpschroeder👇
There is room for improvement.
I ordered a Tesla three weeks ago. Was supposed to be ready yesterday.
But two weeks in they tell me the Texas “Web Dealer Original Title” is inadequate for my trade-in, and I need to request a paper title, delaying the process several weeks.
Conceptually there is certainly no reason a paper title system should be necessary. Part of this may be a matter of Texas title system and out of @Tesla’s control, but it appears many other dealers don’t require this.
,@PalmerLuckey on Peter Thiel, @pmarca, and raising venture capital:
"People say, 'It's so difficult to get a warm intro to people.'"
"Marc Andreessen has a really good point on this."
"He says, 'You know the reason that I want a warm intro for anybody that I'm going to invest in? Because if you can't get anyone in my network—if you can't get any of the 10,000 people with my phone number to say a nice word about you, and you can't track down anyone dumb enough to connect you with me—why would I talk to you? That's part of the test.'"
"I was a 19-year-old kid working a minimum wage job with no college degree, living in a 19-foot camper trailer—and Peter Thiel gave me a million dollars when nobody else would to start Oculus."
Via @HooverInst
It will be interesting to see impact of growing information access, as records of behavior like this can be easily accessed by all sellers/brokers.
Reputation already matters a lot in many sectors, but some (especially residential) remain fragmented enough guys like this can exploit gaps (between norms and their behavior) for years. Unlikely this lasts long as it becomes far easier to find histories on even people you haven’t previously dealt with.
Time and again, engineers and economists have predicted the disruption of brokerage businesses.
Time and again, these predictions have failed.
In any risky transaction, there will always be significant trust factors that cannot be formulaically automated, no matter how sophisticated the platform.
Brokers have played a key role in bridging this since the dawn of time, and no new technology will eliminate this.
Clavicular stops by Reign to share his thoughts on reading. He says he’s ‘more of an article and summary guy’ and that books are too long and worthless