What am I up to now?
June, 2025
Contents
Updates
I know where I’ll be at the beginning of June; I know where I’ll be at the end of June; I don’t know where I’ll be in the middle of the month.
The highlight of May was a four-day trip to Phoenix for a workshop with Schmidt Sciences on developing experiments on AI and the future of work. JB and I were there presenting our project working with a telecom in Africa to serve LLMs over SMS and voice. We received some genuinely great feedback and met some really interesting people doing exciting things in the field. Schmidt Sciences are looking for academics to answer the “big if true” questions about the future of work, and to do so quickly. If academia isn’t exactly the best setting to be answering ambitious questions quickly, the Schmidt team is doing their best to make it easy. They’ve given us an initial grant to get our project moving, and have made the bureaucracy as simple as possible.
I’m learning that when academics complain about grants, it’s not so much about applying to grants, but just the amount of paperwork associated. I’ve been shocked how easy it is to be awarded funding for my research, but how difficult it is to actually use that funding. This experience does speak to my relative strengths and weaknesses, of course: I am much better at writing a convincing essay titled “Why you should let me do what I want” than I am filling out the “Preliminary Doing What You Want Approval Form”.
But! If the forms get filled, the cost-codes get issued, and the correct sacrifices are made under the full moon, we will be in Sierra Leone the week of 9 June.I would have loved to make it back to Gambia for Tabaski this year, but I’m sure we’ll find a fun thing to do in Freetown. This is a scoping trip; we’ll work with our partners at Africell, talk to local NGOs, and most exciting, meet users of the AfriGPT product. Every economist I tell about this project is bemused and perplexed by what these thousands of people could be using the product for. While we have anecdotes (math homework, dating advice, imams prepping their sermons), they don’t really scale. Hopefully we’ll have answers for you all soon.
After Sierra Leone,Touch wood. I’ll be heading to Gustavus, Alaska for LB and HB’s wedding. Lucas is one of my oldest friends and the sweetest, nerdiest, hairiest outdoorsman in my life. I was last in Gustavus three years ago, and I loved the life he and Hailey have built in this tiny community. MWG, SH, and I are also joining the couple on a long kayak trip up into Glacier Bay; I am sure this will be my best memory of the month.
I have a new post up, on the causes of the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. An increasingly popular definition of Artificial General Intelligence is “Transformative AI,” defined as anything that causes changes comparable to the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. My motivating question was “How is AI like the Neolithic, or like the Industrial, Revolution?” I got pretty sidetracked when I started reading about the causes of each.
Links
There’s a famous Tom Stoppard quote:
Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water — the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view. And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.
When you look up the stage directions, it says, ‘Exit Ariel.’
This was at Worcester College, and an academic at Edinburgh has been tracking down some details about the production for an article. I’m not often so excited for a specific article to come out!
You can sell your plasma in the US, but not in Europe. Predictably, the US exports a lot of blood to Europe. But:
The EU recently legalized limited payments for blood donations. The French government opposed this change. The French government owns a company that runs paid plasma centers in the United States.
A common response among economists to “AI might automate human labor” is “AI will invent new tasks for human labor to perform. This is the first paper I’ve seen which tries to categorize “new tasks” created by LLMs. I’m underwhelmed: “The most common [new] task relates to the integration of AI chatbots into the workplace”; “educators increasingly need to detect AI-generated homework”; lawyers “formulating guidelines for chatbot use”. These are not what a new labor market is made of.
Kelsey Piper at Vox shares the prompt she uses to get GPT o3 to play GeoGuessr; an s-tier prompt. I would love to see more examples of high-effort prompting.
On getting book purchases approved by your department’s administrative team, kind of.
Via Gwern, how Australian and Polynesian islanders seeing a cat for the first time:
Perhaps the most arresting ships’ logs describe the cats’ reception on inhabited islands. Here, native people who had never seen a cat of any sort, nor guessed such creatures existed, encounter them for the first time. Nowhere is their species’ power over ours more apparent. “Our cats…struck them with particular astonishment”…after several Aborigines came aboard the HMS Mermaid, docked off Queensland in 1823. “They were…continually caressing the cats, and holding them up for the admiration of their companions on shore.” Among the Samoans, “a passion arose for cats”, noted Titian Peale…“and they were obtained by all possible means from the whale ships visiting the islands.” On Ha’apai, natives stole 2 of Captain Cook’s “Catts”. On Eromanga, natives exchanged cords of fragrant Polynesian sandalwood for the explorers’ felines.
A leopard might easily have a diet of 10–25% monkeys, and the total mortality on a colony can be extraordinarily high: “Based on nocturnal observations, an estimated >8% of the baboon population at Moremi, Botswana was killed annually due to predation by lions and leopards (Busse 1980).”
Previously
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