1. THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION:

   In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran and the Democrats generally. That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month. Quinnipiac just found that over half of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, while more than 80 percent of people were either very concerned or somewhat concerned about the technology. Only 35 percent of people were excited about it.

   These are not my feelings but I understand them. I worry about how this will manifest politically, in China and here. And what do the Chinese feel about AI? Maybe the next three links provide a reason to not hate AI.

2. The task is not the job:

   A job is a bundle of tasks. The real question is not whether AI can perform one component of the bundle. It is whether that component can be separated from the rest at low cost, as we discuss in a recent working paper. When that separation is cheap, the bundle is weak: AI takes a piece, the human role narrows, and labor loses share. When separation is expensive, the bundle is strong: AI helps with part of the work, but the human still sells the full service and keeps the larger share of the revenue.

   Many thought travel agents would be eliminated by online booking. As Ernie Tedeschi of Stripe Economics showed this month, travel agent employment is now more than 60% below its dot-com peak. For most of what agents used to do —searching flights, comparing hotel rates, issuing tickets— the bundle was weak. Separating the booking task from the human was cheap, and once it was cheap, the task was gone. But something else happened to the agents who stayed. They moved upmarket, charged planning fees, and joined luxury consortia that offer upgrades and personalized itineraries. In 2000, average weekly earnings at travel agencies were 87% of the private-sector average. By 2025, they had reached 99%. The surviving agents earn more per hour than they used to, precisely because the machine took the weak part and left them the strong one.

3. What will be scarce?:

   If this is right, then AI won’t just automate the commodity economy. It will trigger the emergence of something new: a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them. The same economic forces that moved 40% of the American workforce off farms and into factories and offices will move workers out of automatable commodity production and into what I’ll call the relational sector. By this I mean the human-intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service itself. The economics of scarcity won’t disappear, it’ll just relocate.

4. The Jevons Paradox and Insatiable Humans: Why AI Won't Empty the Finance Suite:

   when something becomes dramatically cheaper to use, we don't use less of it. We find a million new uses for it — because applications that were previously unthinkable become affordable.

   The intuition here is that if a company was willing to pay $100K for a software engineer, it was because the average engineer was generating more than that much in value for the company. If the same engineer can now be 10x as productive i.e. if they can now generate $1m in value for the company, would the company hire more or less software engineers? Unless you assume that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done, they would hire more. Historically that assumption has been wrong.

   This is a "paper" but reads very much like an article. Recommended.

5. Is Mythos for real? It seems so:

   As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...]

6. I can never talk to an AI anonymously again:

   But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.

7. Why are you like this: Freaky.

8. This will be me.

After last week, did you not expect mean reversion?