Transmission #66: Cheating, Anthropic and Non-linear Ethnic Niches.
Design, ideas and other flotsam.
Hello and welcome.
It’s been a long while … and I’m not sure if this is a sporadic burst on a lazy Sunday afternoon or the start of something more regular, but it will hopefully be something you’ll enjoy.
I’m going to try a new format that might be a bit more sustainable: three links that you really must read. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Marty
I’m building Ciclo Strategy, a platform to help busy organisational leaders create successful strategies and seamlessly operationalise them within their orgs.
If this is something you’ve been crying out for, check out www.ciclostrategy.com.
Non-linear Ethnic Niches
Aporia Magazine
Fascinating socio-economic analysis of how certain ethnic groups seem to dominate certain industries in their adopted countries.
Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores are operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans.
Conversations with Tyler: Jack Clark on AI's Uneven Impact
Tyler Cowen & Jack Clarke
When the information space is so polluted, it’s merciful to find genuine wellsprings of insight. Conversations with Tyler is one of them, and this interview is a cracker. Tyler, in his indomitable style, covers all kinds of ground, and Anthropic’s CEO Jack Clark does an admirable job of keeping up.
Classic Tyler-style questions include:
Where is it in our economy that AGI will affect last in a significant manner?
What will the economics of media look like? If you can read a digest of everything that is probably better than the original, or certainly not worse, or more synthetic. Who gets paid for what?
When Geoffrey Hinton says that, right now, the AIs are conscious, which I think is what he says, I believe he’s crazy. What do you think?
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College
James D. Walsh • New York Magazine
The bleeding obvious: higher education is unravelling at the seams because of the wholesale (ab)use of LLMs to write essays, answer tests and generally sculpt the output of students.
And of course it’s not just the students:
Multiple AI platforms now offer tools to leave AI-generated feedback on students’ essays. Which raises the possibility that AIs are now evaluating AI-generated papers, reducing the entire academic exercise to a conversation between two robots — or maybe even just one.
The fallout of an entire generation (or an entire society) outsourcing their brains to LLMs is an experiment that is unlikely to end well, but we shall see.
Thanks for reading! See you soon!