Guido Traficante

Professor of Economics, Università Europea di Roma and CASMEF - LUISS. Soprattutto tweet calcistici su Lecce e Inter!

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

Appena uscito un libro divulgativo sul debito pubblico che ho scritto con Giorgio Di Giorgio e Alessandro Pandimiglio. L'obiettivo è quello di promuovere una maggiore consapevolezza sul tema @NewtonCompton 👇
https://t.co/9y0CXwHwTM

[chicco testa @chiccotesta]

Una domanda solo a cui vorrei una risposta semplice. Se il costo di produzione di un impianto solare è il più basso in assoluto e sicuramente più basso del prezzo di mercato dell’ energia elettrica come mai non ci sono impianti solari che scommettono semplicemente sul mercato ?

[Nazareno Lecis @LecisNazareno]

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Grazie mille per la domanda.
Rispondo sia a questa sia alla richiesta, arrivata in altri messaggi, di quale sia la logica che porta alla richiesta di ridurre la spesa pensionistica.

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@BiagioSdC @RiccardoTrezzi Cosa propone in alternativa al grafico così chiaro che le hanno mostrato? Quale misura ha in mente che sia più convincente ed esplicativa?

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@dorinileonardo Perché gli altri allenatori non recitano una parte davanti le telecamere? è un allenatore giovane e, in quell'occasione, si è reso conto che non è fattibile essere sempre sincero, contraddicendo quanto aveva detto in precedenza.

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@Hhhhhh65796 @Milestemplaris @tancredipalmeri Oggi non mi sembravano in formissima

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@90ordnasselA Del Psg ha tirato Beraldo...

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@Milestemplaris @tancredipalmeri Semplicemente l'Inter è arrivata cotta sotto tutti i punti di vista e il Psg nel momento migliore dell'anno (oltre ad essere più forte in partenza)

[CEPR @cepr_org]

New CEPR Discussion Paper - DP21537
Supply Chain Uncertainty, Energy Prices and Inflation
Alfonso Merendino @ecb @Unibocconi, Tommaso Monacelli @monacelt @Unibocconi
https://t.co/ItqR4403LY
#CEPR_IMF #CEPR_MEF #EconTwitter

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

A post about Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. Why the Pope is right, but perhaps not right enough.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world in front of our eyes: how we communicate, how we access information, how we work, how income and status are distributed among us, and soon how we fight and kill each other. Yet the public conversation about AI remains stuck on the minutiae of competition between labs, or on a false dichotomy between AI as a “stochastic parrot” with no real capabilities and AI as an alien superintelligence poised to take command of humanity.

The more important questions are about what we want from AI, and whether our current mindset, institutions, and control mechanisms are equal to the task of steering it toward our welfare.

It is refreshing, then, that a bold and powerful voice has weighed into this debate: Pope Leo XIV. As an economist who has long argued that technology is a matter of choice rather than fate, I find Leo’s intervention welcome and, on most points, on target. But on the most consequential question of what AI should actually be designed to do, Leo stops short.

Secular readers may bristle at the encyclical’s opening invocation of the Tower of Babel. They would be mistaken to stop reading there. Leo goes much further than most pundits, journalists and policymakers in the United States by recognizing that what happens to AI, and hence to humanity, is a under our control. There are multiple possible paths for AI, and which one we take will have sweeping consequences. He is also ahead of many commentators when he writes forcefully and unequivocally that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.”

These were the central themes of the book I wrote with Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity. It is heartening to hear them taken up by a voice with Leo's reach.

The Pope is also right to question the current trajectory of AI in warfare and law enforcement. What was taboo only a few years ago – AI-driven mass surveillance, algorithms selecting targets for killing – has become routine. Many in Silicon Valley are now calling openly for a new military-algorithmic complex centered on AI as an instrument of American hard power. Leo captures something deep and too often ignored: “Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict.”

His call for the “disarmament of AI” follows directly from these observations. As he explains, disarming AI means “freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” His moral clarity in stating that “there is no algorithm that can make war morally acceptable” should be a warning to technologists rushing to design new weapons of mass destruction.

Underneath these specific concerns lies a more fundamental claim: that what is technically feasible is not the same as what is good for humanity, and that the difference depends on who controls the technology and what ideology and interests guide them.

Leo edges toward what I take to be the most important point about AI's future when he observes that “while AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than designing machines to work with those who work.”

But here he does not go far enough. He stops short of questioning the prevailing design philosophy of AI itself: a philosophy centered on mimicking human capabilities and automating human tasks, with the ultimate goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can do everything a person can.

This philosophy rests on a mistake. It assumes that artificial intelligence and humanintelligence are fundamentally similar, and therefore machines should naturally take over whatever humans currently do. Yet these intelligences are fundamentally different.

Humans are “one-shot” learners. We form hypotheses from a few examples, mentally simulate possibilities, and refine our understanding through a social process of trial and error. This is how children learn language - imitating a few words, generalizing, and adjusting based on how others respond. We are not, however, very good at absorbing massive volumes of information or sifting through unstructured data for relevant patterns.

AI models are almost the opposite. They thrive on enormous training sets and excel at pattern recognition at scale. But they have, as yet, no genuine creativity, no real-world embodiment, and no capacity for trial-and-error learning grounded in interaction with the physical and social world.

When two things are different – you shouldn’t, and typically you couldn’t – use one to mimic the other. If you did, you would end up with suboptimal, disappointing results. It would have been a colossal mistake, and the Chicago Bulls’s legendary coach Phil Jackson would have gone down in the annals of basketball as one of the worst coaches in history, if he decided in the 1990s that because Michael Jordan was the better player, Jordan should mimic everything that Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman were doing in the team. The team went from championship to championship because these players worked together and complemented each other.

The same applies to AI and human skills.

The more productive path is complementarity – using AI to do what humans cannot, so that humans can do what they do best. An electrician aided by AI diagnostics, a nurse supported by AI in interpreting symptoms, a teacher using AI to personalize instruction for each student; these are the contours of a different AI future, one that raises rather than displaces human capability.

Optimists and industry insiders will respond that automation-first AI can still benefit everyone, provided redistributive policy keeps pace. But this argument has a poor track record. Forty years of digital automation have already concentrated gains at the top, hollowed out middle-skill work, and produced disappointing aggregate productivity growth. There is little reason to expect that an even more powerful round of automation, deployed by even more concentrated firms, will end differently. We can and must demand a different design.

The global stakes from the future of AI are even larger than those we can see around us in the United States. For the developing world, where billions still depend on the prospect of decent jobs as a path out of poverty, an automation-centric AI agenda is not merely suboptimal. It is simply transferring to foreclose the most important route to broad-based prosperity.

The biggest failing of today's AI industry is its refusal to recognize any of this. It is guided instead by an ideology of control (the industry’s own over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.

As Leo rightly notes, this failure is enabled by the fact that a handful of companies now command the future of AI.

What we need is a combination of moral clarity and a serious, society-wide debate about what AI can do and what we want it to do. That debate must move beyond exhortation toward concrete choices: antitrust action against the dominant platforms, public investment in human-complementary AI, regulation of surveillance and autonomous weapons, and meaningful rights for workers and citizens over the data on which these systems are built.

The Pope's intervention makes such a debate a little more likely today than it was before.

It is now up to the rest of us to carry it further than he was willing to go.

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@Ci1812 La canzone di Elisa

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@pisto_gol Magari qui da noi!

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@FPanunzi Assurdo che nessuno glielo abbia segnalato, è andato avanti almeno 5 minuti!

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

amen

[Mario Macis @Mario_Macis]

“Non può esistere una crescita economica infinita in un mondo con risorse finite.” Affermazione intuitiva, ma molto discutibile, soprattutto per le implicazioni che spesso se ne derivano.

Un esempio: il solare fotovoltaico ha visto i suoi costi crollare negli ultimi decenni ed è oggi una fonte energetica in rapidissima crescita. Il sole non durerà per sempre, certo, ma durerà altri 5 miliardi di anni, il che ai nostri fini pratici è indistinguibile dall’infinito (e quando si esaurirà, avremo problemini un po’ più grossi, diciamo; e in ogni caso non è affatto chiaro che l’infinito sia l’orizzonte di riferimento più sensato).

Il vincolo non era la risorsa, ma la tecnologia. E quel vincolo lo stiamo risolvendo. Del resto, non siamo certo usciti dall’età della pietra per mancanza di pietre (non ricordo chi lo ha detto): siamo passati a qualcosa di meglio. Allo stesso modo, molto probabilmente abbandoneremo carbone e petrolio ben prima che si esauriscano, non perché finiscono, ma perché avremo di meglio.

La finitezza di una risorsa non è necessariamente un vincolo: la storia ci insegna che l’ingegno umano tende a renderla irrilevante prima che diventi un problema. Le risorse non sono necessariamente un dato fisso, sono definite dalla tecnologia e dalla conoscenza, che non si esauriscono (anche se queste dipendono eccome da istruzione, istituzioni e investimenti e non possiamo darle per scontate, ma è un altro discorso).

La buona notizia è che, per fortuna, non abbiamo bisogno di quella premessa per dare importanza all’ambiente: le ragioni per tutelare ecosistemi, biodiversità e clima sono solidissime e stanno in piedi da sole. Ma confonderle con un limite fisso alla crescita ci farebbe un torto enorme, perché la crescita economica resta lo strumento più potente che abbiamo per sottrarre alla povertà le troppe persone che ancora oggi ci sono intrappolate.

[Antonio Belloni @AntoBelloni01]

La disamina di Cesc Fàbregas a @partidazocope sui problemi del calcio italiano:

“Parte tutto dal basso, parte dai settori giovanili, dalle credenze, dai valori che si vogliono trasmettere, dal voler solo vincere e insegnare tattica ai bimbi di dieci anni. Non funziona così. Tattica e giocare solo per vincere. Devono potersi sviluppare, ciascuno coi suoi tempi. C’è bisogno di più uno contro uno, più conduzioni, serve più gioco individuale, la tattica individuale soprattutto. La tattica collettiva si apprende in fretta, ma a interpretare il gioco bisogna iniziare da subito. Altrimenti, è già tardi, e paesi come il nostro (Spagna), Olanda o il Portogallo -che sta crescendo molto- ti mangiano. E se ci arrivi tardi e fai passare tempo, poi devi tirare la corda ed è più difficile”.

[Jonathan Benchimol @Benchimolium]

🚨 Public Good Alert 🚨

Two years of development. Zero funding. 𝟲,𝟲𝟵𝟯 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝟱𝟭 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗯𝗮𝗻𝗸𝘀. #TextData

Today, we are opening the doors to it all for free 🚀

Visit our website: https://t.co/ToBke8Dxww

🧵1/12 #NLP

[Il Carlo 🖤💙 Double 🏆🏆 @East_10]

Rumba? Rumba

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

"I don’t think we fully know what the effects of AI is going to be, but like every major invention a lot of the effect depends, not so much on the invention itself, but on the people who use it.”

In our interview with Joel Mokyr, he explains how he never imagined when buying his first PC in the eighties that he'd eventually use it to listen to music, talk with family and watch movies.

Watch our full interview: https://t.co/2NC7mHQcOW

[Guido Traficante @guidotraf]

@marifcinter Secondo me, considerando che nella formazione ideale c'era Zanetti a sinistra e Thiago a centrocampo, Mou avrebbe messo Chala accanto al Cuchu e Lautaro per Pandev se avesse fatto quel ruolo

[Ricardo Perez-Truglia @pereztruglia]

🚨 Are you about to submit an Economics paper?

I made a free tool that suggests journals/editors that may be a good fit.

Super easy to use. Just upload a PDF of your paper: https://t.co/izY83ftTOS

#EconTwitter

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[Interisti Stalinisti @IStalinisti]

Evaristo Beccalossi era - è e sarà - un esempio di interismo pulito e delicato. Rappresentante perfetto del calcio della sua generazione, giocatore sublime e persona eccezionale.
Ha resistito fino a vedere il Ventunesimo per gioirne con noi e poi ci ha salutati.

Ciao, Becca 🥹❤️