Prof. Cozer

Sou professor, consultor, escritor, lecionei na FEI, FGV, USP e UFPE, matemática, planejamento, TI, e empreendedorismo.

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Autonomia da informação, @thaisheredia , @madeiradez , @mackenzie1870 .

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

CEO

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

CEOs find themselves being pulled in all directions by governments’ competing aims. What should they do? https://t.co/I9SF7L72kx

Image: Ricardo Rey

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Paris

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

🏅@jordimeeus is our final winner of the #TDF2023

🏅@jordimeeus est notre dernier vainqueur du #TDF2023

#TDF2023 | @Continental_fr

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Oppie

[Bloomberg @business]

'Oppenheimer' is not your typical summer movie: Review https://t.co/i2sxYZMaOy

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Produtividade,

[Stanford Digital Economy Lab @DigEconLab]

A new @BrookingsInst piece out this morning by @erikbryn, @akorinek, and Martin Neil Baily makes the case for an AI-powered productivity boom that will benefit all of society.

https://t.co/7D8VUMJjcI

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

CNJ intima magistrado que bebeu e invadiu delegacia com carro oficial https://t.co/XPbITD4OF2

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Chat

[Andreas Hepp | @[email protected] @Andreas_Hepp]

My book “Deep Mediatization“ is out, published at
@Routledge_MandC. It is about the re-#figuration of #society by digital media, discussing #mediatization and #datafication, #infrastructures, #pioneercommunities, #data, and much more. Have a look: https://t.co/wFL6klzBvr

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

China

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

The Actual Risk Of Not Pursuing AI With Maximum Force And Speed

There is one final, and real, AI risk that is probably the scariest at all:

AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.

China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command and control AI.

The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.

I propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with the Soviet Union.

“We win, they lose.”

Rather than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, “harmful” AI, job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back feet, we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly can.

We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not.

In the process, we should drive AI into our economy and society as fast and hard as we possibly can, in order to maximize its gains for economic productivity and human potential.

This is the best way both to offset the real AI risks and to ensure that our way of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision.

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

O @erikbryn

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

AI Risk #3: Will AI Take All Our Jobs?

The fear of job loss due variously to mechanization, automation, computerization, or AI has been a recurring panic for hundreds of years, since the original onset of machinery such as the mechanical loom. Even though every new major technology has led to more jobs at higher wages throughout history, each wave of this panic is accompanied by claims that “this time is different” – this is the time it will finally happen, this is the technology that will finally deliver the hammer blow to human labor. And yet, it never happens.

We’ve been through two such technology-driven unemployment panic cycles in our recent past – the outsourcing panic of the 2000’s, and the automation panic of the 2010’s. Notwithstanding many talking heads, pundits, and even tech industry executives pounding the table throughout both decades that mass unemployment was near, by late 2019 – right before the onset of COVID – the world had more jobs at higher wages than ever in history.

Nevertheless this mistaken idea will not die.

And sure enough, it’s back.

This time, we finally have the technology that’s going to take all the jobs and render human workers superfluous – real AI. Surely this time history won’t repeat, and AI will cause mass unemployment – and not rapid economic, job, and wage growth – right?

No, that’s not going to happen – and in fact AI, if allowed to develop and proliferate throughout the economy, may cause the most dramatic and sustained economic boom of all time, with correspondingly record job and wage growth – the exact opposite of the fear. And here’s why.

The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do.

The Lump Of Labor Fallacy flows naturally from naive intuition, but naive intuition here is wrong. When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.

But the good news doesn’t stop there. We also get higher wages. This is because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest. The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages.

To summarize, technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes the prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to rise. This in turn causes economic growth and job growth, while motivating the creation of new jobs and new industries. If a market economy is allowed to function normally and if technology is allowed to be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward cycle that never ends. For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs are endless” – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology doesn’t destroy jobs and never will.

These are such mindblowing ideas for people who have not been exposed to them that it may take you some time to wrap your head around them. But I swear I’m not making them up – in fact you can read all about them in standard economics textbooks. I recommend the chapter The Curse of Machinery in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson, and Frederic Bastiat’s satirical Candlemaker’s Petition to blot out the sun due to its unfair competition with the lighting industry, here modernized for our times.

But this time is different, you’re thinking. This time, with AI, we have the technology that can replace ALL human labor.

But, using the principles I described above, think of what it would mean for literally all existing human labor to be replaced by machines.

It would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent. Prices of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero. Consumer welfare would skyrocket. Consumer spending power would skyrocket. New demand in the economy would explode. Entrepreneurs would create dizzying arrays of new industries, products, and services, and employ as many people and AI as they could as fast as possible to meet all the new demand.

Suppose AI once again replaces that labor? The cycle would repeat, driving consumer welfare, economic growth, and job and wage growth even higher. It would be a straight spiral up to a material utopia that neither Adam Smith or Karl Marx ever dared dream of.

We should be so lucky.

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Observe, @rmesquita

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

The Baptists And Bootleggers Of AI

Economists have observed a longstanding pattern in reform movements of this kind. The actors within movements like these fall into two categories – “Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing on the historical example of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s:

“Baptists” are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel – deeply and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions, regulations, and laws are required to prevent societal disaster. For alcohol prohibition, these actors were often literally devout Christians who felt that alcohol was destroying the moral fabric of society. For AI risk, these actors are true believers that AI presents one or another existential risks – strap them to a polygraph, they really mean it.

“Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors. For alcohol prohibition, these were the literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans when legitimate alcohol sales were banned. For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks.

A cynic would suggest that some of the apparent Baptists are also Bootleggers – specifically the ones paid to attack AI by their universities, think tanks, activist groups, and media outlets. If you are paid a salary or receive grants to foster AI panic…you are probably a Bootlegger.

The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win. The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong.

We just lived through a stunning example of this – banking reform after the 2008 global financial crisis. The Baptists told us that we needed new laws and regulations to break up the “too big to fail” banks to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again. So Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was marketed as satisfying the Baptists’ goal, but in reality was coopted by the Bootleggers – the big banks. The result is that the same banks that were “too big to fail” in 2008 are much, much larger now.

So in practice, even when the Baptists are genuine – and even when the Baptists are right – they are used as cover by manipulative and venal Bootleggers to benefit themselves.

And this is what is happening in the drive for AI regulation right now.

However, it isn’t sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the Bootleggers on their merits.

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Code

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

First, a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it. AI is a computer program like any other – it runs, takes input, processes, and generates output. AI’s output is useful across a wide range of fields, ranging from coding to medicine to law to the creative arts. It is owned by people and controlled by people, like any other technology.

A shorter description of what AI isn’t: Killer software and robots that will spring to life and decide to murder the human race or otherwise ruin everything, like you see in the movies.

An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we care about better.

Why AI Can Make Everything We Care About Better

The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.

Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.

AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.

In our new era of AI:

Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.

Every person will have an AI assistant/coach/mentor/trainer/advisor/therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful. The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes.

Every scientist will have an AI assistant/collaborator/partner that will greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver will have the same in their worlds.

Every leader of people – CEO, government official, nonprofit president, athletic coach, teacher – will have the same. The magnification effects of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all.

Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.

Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and medicines will dramatically expand, as AI helps us further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit.

The creative arts will enter a golden age, as AI-augmented artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers gain the ability to realize their visions far faster and at greater scale than ever before.

I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.

In short, anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.

And this isn’t just about intelligence! Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be. AI art gives people who otherwise lack technical skills the freedom to create and share their artistic ideas. Talking to an empathetic AI friend really does improve their ability to handle adversity. And AI medical chatbots are already more empathetic than their human counterparts. Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer.

The stakes here are high. The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly the most important – and best – thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips, and probably beyond those.

The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future.

We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can.

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Previ

[Leo Siqueira @leosiqueirabr]

- Entramos com uma ação contra a captura política da Previ.

- O Juiz afastou o indicado que era do sindicato dos bancários.

- O Desembargador colocou ele de volta.

E agora vem essa notícia de contratos milionários (33 milhões) na Previ!

Que beleza!

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Reforma tributária aprovada na Câmara foi uma vitória de Pirro https://t.co/ptdqKm69s5 via @ConJur_Oficial

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Perigo

[Estael Sias @Estaelsias]

RESUMÃO DA SEMANA:

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

War

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

Ukraine shows that a new era of high-tech war has begun. Democracies must learn the lessons of this new kind of industrial combat—or risk losing to armies that do https://t.co/UUatE8eLq7

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Tour

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

⏱ Stage 1 / Étape 1 ⏱

🚩 @bilbao_udala - 🏁 @bilbao_udala
📏 182 km
⏰ 12:55 CEST > 17:28 CEST
⛰ 3x3️⃣c, 1x2️⃣c, 1x4️⃣ c
💚 km 88,2

#TDF2023

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Chuva

[CTTU Recife @CTTU_Recife]

👮‍♀️👮‍♂️

Às 8h, a Central de Operações de Trânsito identificou os seguintes pontos de alagamento na cidade:

- Av. Recife, na altura da Rua João Cabral de Melo Neto;
- Av. Recife, na Entrada do Ibura
- Av. Dois Rios, próximo à entrada da Vila do SESI
(+)

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

Clima

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

The trade-off between development and climate change is impossible to avoid. The world’s poorest people could be harmed unless leaders face up to hard truths https://t.co/Rdn75oiIVG

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

El kirchnerismo rompe el pacto democrático https://t.co/jRzWU2ZjWo via @LANACION

[Prof. Cozer @mtscozer]

De negociador da dívida externa brasileira a um dos grandes tradutores:
https://t.co/eYlnGphr1h