| | "Redirecting the arc of history" "If we're so rich, why aren't we happy?" Brink Lindsey ruminates on this "profound, complicated question" as he considers the history of humanity. As Lindsey contends, industrialization has led to "a spectacular, ongoing rise in the social surplus"—but despite the benefits that have accrued, true prosperity has yet to materialize. This general uplift in mankind's material condition has created the circumstances in which mass flourishing becomes possible—in which the vast run of ordinary people, not just a pampered and exploitative elite, have the resources and leisure to develop and exercise their own capabilities and reap the psychic rewards that flow from the actualization of human potential. Being able to afford mass flourishing and actually achieving it are two different things, however, and the United States and other advanced democracies are presently caught in the gap between the two. Ironically, the social arrangements that enabled the accumulation of our vast social surplus, together with the cultural responses to that accumulation, have vastly complicated the task of making the possible real. Indeed, even as our material circumstances continue to improve, across much of society the state of spiritual well-being has actually been deteriorating. Getting richer as a society is no longer making us happier overall; indeed, the effect is rather the opposite. For Lindsey, capitalism writ large has been promoting the conditions that make flourishing possible (boosting "life expectancy, health, education, and material living standards") while at the same time limiting them (increasing the cost of living, diminishing what Lindsey calls "the spiritual rewards of work," and more). Although you may quibble with some of the finer points of Lindsey's analysis, his speculation is never uninteresting—and neither are the two solutions he offers. If you've been following housing prices, the first you may be able to guess: As Lindsey notes, "We might have purchased considerably more leisure with our riches up to now if we weren't simultaneously making it much more expensive to be a functional member of society." To that end, working to make life more affordable would go a long way toward "mass flourishing." But it's his other proposition—"to decentralize some forms of production down to the household and local level"—that's more unexpected. Lindsey envisions innovations that would improve standards of living, "achieved through the creation of vital face-to-face communities joined together by shared practical responsibilities." Though he imagines this would emerge as part of the "global capitalist division of labor," Lindsey makes clear that it would be a "rearrangement of its priorities," which he believes will resituate people's relationship to the inequities of capitalism as they often experience it. Very interesting. + From Vox: "Are $18 Big Macs the price of falling inequality?" | | | | | "Fixing America's broken start-up system" Another important question: "There is no immediately obvious reason why this generation of start-ups should be so financially disastrous. . . .So why can't today's start-ups also succeed?" asks Jeffrey Funk in a 2021 article in American Affairs. Tracing a history of venture funding over the past quarter-century, which on the whole he finds marked by a "decline in returns," Funk proffers one answer: "The most significant problem for today's start-ups is that there have been few if any new technologies to exploit." (Funk notes that AI and data analytics businesses may be the exception, but as of now they're still far from profitable.) As his incisive research illustrates, "Technologies, not business models, enabled many of the successful start-ups of the previous generation to succeed." Here's where the fix comes in: developing new technologies that are actually transformative will mean upending the current focus on "platform business models for value capture." As I've long argued, venture capital's obsession with "blitzscaling" unprofitable businesses in a race for monopoly power has poisoned competition and squandered the opportunity to build sustainable yet transformative businesses. Funk also contends that we should "return basic research to corporate labs" and away from universities, which have different research goals than businesses. Ultimately, he maintains, "we need less hype, more realistic economic analysis, and more breakthrough technologies." It's not a new article, but the years since its publication have done little to dissuade us from trusting Funk's astute thesis. + ICYMI: I also addressed the problems of venture capital and Silicon Valley entrepreneurship in "The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?" | | | | | Could transparent wood enable the next big startup? Still, revolutionary developments in research continue, and some might even prove the foundation for the next successful startup. Bloomberg's F.D. Flam has put together a list of the "10 most intriguing science breakthroughs of 2023." Longtime readers may recognize one or two—we've definitely talked about the effects of drugs like Ozempic and spent some time exploring climate tech. But we haven't yet wrangled with gravitational waves, gene-editing treatments for sickle cell disease, AI interpreting thoughts from brain scans, or "rats. . .[that] can imagine and plan ahead." + And what about applications for transparent wood? Or "water batteries"? + Here's Noah Smith's yearly "techno-optimism" post for 2024. | | | | | On the cognitive era AI may be a truly transformational technology that will power a new field of startups and revolutionize the way we work (concerns about data and provenance notwithstanding). I've long argued that we should think of AI as a tool to expand the power of workers, not to replace them. And we're starting to get an idea of just what that will look like, as people begin to experiment with tools like ChatGPT. John Nosta argues in Psychology Today that this AI augmentation has pushed us into a new epoch—he calls it the "cognitive era"—in which " thought [is] the new currency of progress and innovation." Nosta posits that by offloading our "routine and data-intensive tasks" to AI, humans will be free to be more creative, and in the process better able to come up with the innovations that will transform our world. It's a wildly optimistic idea that emphasizes the abiding promise of (and need for) human capability in a world beset by AI technology. | | | | | | —Tim O’Reilly and Peyton Joyce | | | |
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