I was thrown back into thinking about existential risk and AI recently.¹ The brain churn that the topic causes me brought up these thoughts: Incremental damage — maybe instead of focusing on one big whomp we should be thinking about things which decrease capacity/standards of living and the potential for…

There are a couple repeated and intertwining strains that I am coming across, when not amused by balloons or horrified by disasters. Those strains are: AI — what can it do, what can’t it do, machinations of industry around it; the labor market and workers; and… the enshittification (per Doctorow)…

Can things change? — What are the odds that an ingrained societal issue can be fixed, or at least changed? Some problems seem unfixable — beyond the ability of any group to solve even despite widespread agreement that the problem exists. …

Three areas I neglected in an earlier post about the covid-19 pandemic and economic effects are: global nature of the pandemic, history of pandemics, and long term health effects. At the time, I considered only the US economy because data on the age distribution of deaths was available for the…

Good Judgment has been asking its Superforecasters® to forecast longer term questions recently.¹ Some questions are only a little stretch, instead of 6 months or a year, try 18 months, 2 years, or maybe 3, while other questions have jumped far ahead to ask about conditions more than a decade…

Headlines about inflation are everywhere and many articles I’ve seen talk about too much fiscal stimulus. What I haven’t seen is anyone talking about all of the dead people. Wouldn’t pandemic-related losses cause some problems with supply? Probably I’m wrong — I’m going to lay out my reasoning anyway. One…