Unlike in the past, technological innovation, our era’s engine of progress, risks provoking cultural and political regress. Will Europe’s economy surprise its naysayers in 2024? How the big tech giants are breaking the rules in their desperate quest for (our) digital data. What is causing cancer in today’s young? Could co-operation rather than competition be the secret to survival?
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
ARTICLE OF THE WEEK
Adrian Wooldridge, Dune 2 Predicts the Future Better than Fukuyama
(Bloomberg, 6 April 2024)
The Middle Ages seem to be making a comeback everywhere! The global business columnist argues that the film is not only a riveting piece of cinema but has also something to say about where the world is headed. It involves a mishmash of the hyper-modern and the medieval (like sword fights and nuclear arsenals), inferring that the world is becoming a mash-up of supposed incompatibles. Rather than “the end of history,” we are witnessing the confusion of history. A key insight: contrary to the past (like during the Enlightenment), “the great engine of progress, technological innovation, is instead producing cultural and political regress” (gifted article, reads in 8-10 min).
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Kenneth Rogoff, Can Europe’s Economy Exceed Expectations in 2024?
(Project Syndicate, 5 April 2024)
Most people expect the European economy to underperform in 2024, but the Harvard economist thinks it could be the opposite. Even though Germany’s ongoing economic weakness suggests that the EU’s long-term economic slump will not end anytime soon, traditional laggards like Italy and France show signs of recovery, while Central and East European members are performing well. Therefore, the bloc’s economic outlook could still take a turn for the better (metered paywall that may require prior registration, reads in 5-6 min).
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Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang, Sheera Frenkel, Stuart Thompson, How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.
(The New York Times, 8 April 2024)
“Scale is all you need”. A damning examination by the NYT on how big tech broke every rule of data collection while simultaneously trying to convince us that they could self-regulate. The sentence that sums it up: “The race to lead AI has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies, debated bending the law” (gifted article, reads in 20 min+).
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Dylan Scott, Why are so many young people getting cancer?
(VOX, 8 April 2024)
Cancers among young adults have become a global health crisis, and one of the most pressing questions for modern medicine. Adults in the prime of their lives, often otherwise outwardly healthy, are dying of aggressive cancers that appear to develop more quickly and more deadly than in the past, for reasons that scientists cannot adequately explain. As a result, researchers from all continents are teaming up to investigate the leading lifestyle and environmental risk factors — from toxins, microplastics and air pollution to ultra-processed foods — believed to be contributing to the spike in early cancers (free access, reads in about 15 min).
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Jonathan Goodman, Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?
(Nature, 8 April 2024)
A recent study of evolutionary biology that became a book (“Selfish Genes to Social Beings”) suggests that there is more to life than just competition. The idea that cooperation is fundamentally at odds with competition emerged because of the sociobiology movement of the 1970s, when some biologists argued that all human behaviour is reducible to a Darwinian need to be the ‘fittest’. This is wrong, or at very least more nuanced. The reality, as “Selfish Genes to Social Beings” shows, “is not black and white” (metered paywall, reads in 3-4 min).
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