Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Castles Made of Sand

In Scientific American, David Taylor unearths the global crime rings cornering the market on – yes – sand. Could sand become the new oil?

Sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050.

Stunning fact: China used more cement from 2011 to 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century.

2. Not Up for Debate

Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen reports on the current state of the university’s learning environment. Beyond the widely reported campus incidents since October 7th, the real issue is that students want to avoid contentious subjects:

Students have asked me to excuse them from discussing or being examined on guns, gang violence, domestic violence, the death penalty, L.G.B.T.Q. issues, police brutality, kidnapping, suicide, and abortion. I have declined, because I believe the most important skill I teach is the ability to have rigorous exchanges on difficult topics, but professors across the country have agreed to similar requests.

3. Can Argentina Stop Crying?

For the first time in memory, a Davos speech became an internet sensation. Argentinian President Javier Milei delivered a trolling stemwinder on free markets amid otherwise tedious proceedings on global taxation rates. Economist Bryan Caplan, who believes Milei’s libertarian experiment might succeed, explores the depths of Argentina’s problems:

Argentina is desperate, again. From the mid-70s to the early 90s, Argentina’s inflation habitually exceeded 100% per year. Now, after three decades of keeping inflation in the double digits, Argentinian prices are once again more than doubling every year. Hyperinflation’s return is only the most visible of its economic failures: The official poverty rate, around 25% in 2017, now exceeds 40%. Even during normal times, Argentina’s economy has been a severe underperformer for more than a century: In 1910, the average American was only 25% richer than the average Argentine. Now it’s about 400%

4. It’s Curtains for Ticket Stubs

Theatergoer Bailey Sincox bemoans physical tickets being replaced by QR codes. She thinks the technology destroys some of Broadway’s magic:

Tickets, playbills, and the like are, by definition, ephemeral (their use value is expended once the curtains close). But because they bear the traces of live performance––that elusive, embodied, shared something that happens only in one room at one time––they also serve as a record. They tell us what it was like to be there.

Since at least the 18th century, theater patrons have collected tickets and other theatrical documents. Saved in scrapbooks, albums, and shoeboxes, such memorabilia have served both as personal keepsakes and as a kind of dispersed, informal chronicle, a resource for those studying the past.

5. A History of Fake Photos

Who else will feel the pinch of AI? According to Tyler Cowen, anyone who has thrived as an ideas person:

AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.

6. Yes, But Is it AI-Powered?

For 25 years, Steve Sinofsky has walked through the Consumer Electronic Show and concluded with a long report of his observations. This year, as part of his excellent summary, he finds groupthink in AI dishwashers: 

The show responded to the rise of ChatGPT with an all-out assault on the use of “AI” in signage, naming, branding, and talk tracks. It clearly reached comical proportions. Samsung, perhaps representative of the relative dullness of the mega-tech companies, was all-in on AI. I was in their booth reading a sign about AI being used in some sort of dish washer and two of the staffers approached me (this was end of show Friday). I chuckled and I said to them “looks like you got the memo on using AI in the description”. 

Websites Worth Reading

NY Magazine Archives: NY Magazine’s new archive of old writing

AI, and Everything Else: Ben Evans’s annual tech presentation

Synthesia: Turn speaker notes into AI video

Feeds We Follow

@rachelcohrs: Washington DC health reporter

@UNWatch : Geneva-based watchdog

@vijaypande: Silicon Valley biotech investor