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- AI's Taking Control, DOGE, & Sub-Saharan Africa for the Win
AI's Taking Control, DOGE, & Sub-Saharan Africa for the Win
What I'm reading, listening to, and watching
Alan Pentz
November 06, 2024
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Let’s dive in…
Another mind-blown article about AI from Ethan Mollick’s One Useful Thing. Mollick is doing the best writing out there about how to use publicly available AI tools. In this post, he shows how to use the new agent capabilities of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 model. This allows the model to take control of a user’s computer and perform a variety of tasks. It can “use“ your computer’s browser and software programs.
First he has the model monitor a video of a construction site to identify risks and safety issues that can be addressed. It not only does so but then turns them into a spreadsheet and a checklist to be addressed. You now have a free business analyst monitoring your operations and making suggestions on how to improve.
Next he instructs the model to try to buy items from both Walmart and Amazon’s sites and develop a set of recommendations and a report on how each website performs and suggestions for improvement.
Then Mollick uses a new avatar tool from HeyGen and records what seems like a typical work Zoom meeting with an AI generated “person.” Of course these tools are in their early days. They can be a bit kludgy but as they develop, the variety of tasks they can handle will grow exponentially. This stuff is just amazing.
Curtis Yarvin writes the best thing I’ve read on how government works in years. He’s commenting on Elon’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, get it?) that Trump is promising him. In my experience, these big efforts usually amount to not much. Maybe a few things will come out in the end and that’s good but Yarvin makes three key points.
Most of the ideas DOGE comes up with will already be in the policy mix. There’s a whole set of players and institutions whose job is to manufacture policy ideas. They’ll see DOGE coming and throw all their ideas on the bandwagon. Very few new ideas will emerge.
Most of the important ideas will have to go through the meat grinder of Congress where lobbyists and activists will turn everything into pulp. Others will become Executive Orders but as Yarvin writes “An EO is like a tweet, but without a character limit.” They have limited effect and can be quickly overturned in the next Administration.
Even those ideas that make it through the meat grinder will have to be implemented by the bureaucracy. That will take forever and be only mildly effective.
Big grand initiatives like this mostly fail. The government and the machine around it are too big for one effort to wrangle it. As Yarvin points out, Twitter was an underperforming company and Musk went in and cleaned house, but it was a company. Once he controlled the shares, he called the shots. Our government was set up to specifically prevent this from happening.
In my view, Musk would be far more effective focusing a one or two key goals. Something like permit reform for industrial, energy, and infrastructure projects or procurement reform particularly in defense. Those are areas where we desperately need reform and a live player like Elon could make a huge difference. They just aren’t sexy.
Finally Joachim Klement from his blog Klement on Investing writes:
Currently, trade is centred around Europe with some 42% of global trade involving at least one European country. The ageing demographics of Europe mean that this share is likely to decline somewhat towards 40% and a little below before recovering again after 2050. But if we take productivity and income effects into account, Europe will likely lose its status as the global centre of trade and see its share in global trade drop significantly to well below 20%. It will still be bigger than North America, but only barely so.
Meanwhile, the two big winners are likely to be South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Demographic effects alone will increase the global trade share of Sub-Saharan Africa from 2% today to 10% in 2100. But if the increase in productivity and income is included, the projected share in global trade rises to 27% turning Sub-Saharan Africa into the world’s most important trading hub! South Asia, meanwhile, could see its share in global trade rise to 12%, on par with Europe.
2100 could look very different from today indeed, with a quarter of global trade centred around Sub-Sharan Africa and Europe, North America, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia ex China all hovering around 10-15%. China could be a small player at less than 10% of global trade and Latin America even less important than it is today.
I’m not sure about this outcome but I think it’s fascinating to contemplate how all of our assumptions and struggles of today will be made obsolete just by the passage of time. Who's thinking about Sub-Saharan African trade? Pretty much no one but within another generation or two it might be what people think about all the time.
Keep learning,
Alan
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