Get out, gambling, AI and democracy
Lux Recommends #492
Conservatives touching grass, bad — and good — writing about gambling, and why AI might improve democracy. Plus my dispatch from the Hill and Valley Forum.
From Lux Capital
Our very own Lan Jiang has been named to The Information’s Next General Partners list. The publication acknowledged her crucial role in securing our investment in Together.ai.
Last year, Lux portfolio company eGenesis successfully transplanted two of its genetically modified pig kidneys into volunteers with end-stage kidney disease. That early success led to the FDA to scale up the program to help researchers collect more data. Read more about it — and the company’s next trials — in Fast Company’s recent profile.
Meanwhile, Sakana AI has a new paper out in Nature. In “The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated AI Research,” the team describes its efforts to build an AI agent powered by foundation models capable of executing the entire machine learning research lifecycle.
From around the web
1. Rough riders
I was stuck inside most of this week at the Hill and Valley Forum, which might be why I have the great outdoors on the brain. If you do, too, head over to Harpers to read the latest from Gaby Del Valle, who writes about the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a conservative environmentalist group styled as a Rooseveltian alternative to liberal environmentalism. Gaby comes away from the group’s summit in Tennessee wondering if today’s Abundance Movement might be a better parallel than the old cowboy.
More than their disdain for red tape, however, these movements share a tendency toward magical thinking. When it comes to the climate, they tend to disregard the urgency of the present to dream about the world to come or romanticize the mythic past. Abundance insists that no matter how much damage modern life has wreaked on the planet, we can reverse it without pain or sacrifice—someday. …The version of this program embraced by conservative environmentalists is even more fantastical, suggesting that, with enough entrepreneurial spirit, we can literally turn back time to when men were men, families came first, and Americans were outnumbered by herds of wild buffalo in landscapes of unblemished majesty.
2. Northern lights
Lux scientist-in-residence Samuel Arbesman also brings us tales of the open air this week via Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG. In the 1870s, Finnish physicist Karl Lemström built increasingly large electromagnetic apparatuses on Arctic mountaintops in an attempt to trigger the Northern Lights and prove their electromagnetic origins. Whether he actually succeeded or merely witnessed natural auroras remains uncertain, but Karl is tickled by the idea of someday stumbling upon Lemström’s abandoned project out there in the wild.
3. Sucker punched
With all the chatter about sports betting markets, a think-piece/personal essay on becoming a sports gambler was all but inevitable. Well, consider this an anti-recommendation from Laurence Pevsner for McKay Coppins’ “Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler,” which has been making the rounds. You’d do better to check out Maria Konnikova’s criticism of the piece’s confirmation bias, selective use of history, and misleading framing.
The gambling community wasn’t incensed because this hits too close to home. They were incensed, I think, because “Sucker” is couched as being a journalistic account, yet the logic is flawed, the analysis facile, and the framing, misleading at its best and just careless and wrong at its worst. Which is really too bad, because, as I’ve already said, I agree with many of the points that Coppins makes along the way. I just wish those points were made in a framework I could get behind. As they stand, they are far too easy to dismiss.
4. Gutenberg’s revenge
Finally, Katie Salam liked this optimistic take on AI and democracy from Andy Hall in Free Systems. Andy argues that AI presents a historic opportunity to strengthen democracy, comparing it to the printing press in its potential to spread knowledge — and intelligence. He presents three layers needed to achieve “political superintelligence” alongside the big problems facing each.
We also have a lot of advantages our forebears didn’t have at the time Gutenberg built his press in the 1440s. We know a lot more now. We have hundreds of years of experience with modern government and democracy, we have access to modern scientific techniques, large-scale data, powerful computers, and AI itself. We have tremendous tools we can bring to bear.
