> Many of the world’s leading researchers believe that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers.
> “A.I. is code. And now, A.I. can code,” a veteran researcher, Richard Socher, said. “The ingredients are there.”
> Dr. Socher recently founded, with seven other researchers, a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called “recursive self-improvement.”
> His start-up, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including Google Ventures and Greycroft and the chip-making giants Nvidia and AMD. The six-month-old company, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has fewer than 30 employees. But it is now valued at more than $4 billion.
“It's possible that [being a VC] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."
Interestingly, his justification is not that VCs are measurably good at what they do, but rather that they appear to be so bad at what they do:
“Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]. There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis."
(Personally, I’m not quite sure he actually believes this - but watching him is a certain kind of masterclass in using spicy takes to generate publicity / awareness / buzz. And by talking about him I’m participating in his clever scheme.)
The author is Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy (as well as Humanities, Political Science, and Law) at Stanford.
He’s the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (about which Peter Singer wrote: “Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world, but Blood Oil is such a book.”)
Wenar studied philosophy at Harvard with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and was Karl Popper’s research assistant.
According to the reporter, this abandoned theme park is a harbinger of doom for China's economy. But couldn't it instead be viewed as evidence of entrepreneurial risk-taking activity? Taking risks, by definition, involves projects that don't pan out.
Imagine if, every time a silicon valley startup abandoned 100k lines of code to pursue a better idea, reporters swooped in and pointed this out as evidence of impending doom.
(Note that I'm not addressing, and certainly not condoning, China's societal/governance problems, e.g. whether the land was taken unfairly from the farmers, etc. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.)
1. Steve Jobs studied calligraphy. At the Stanford commencement address he said:
"I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."
3. And, closer to home for me: my co-founder's first degree was in economics, but he still felt something missing, so he got a second degree which started in painting but ended up in design. He ended up with a completely unique ability to think in a both left- and right-brained way simultaneously.
So, if you feel that both programming and painting reside within you, then you are rare, and my evidence strongly suggests that you find some way to nurture these parts of yourself.
This beautifully illustrates Thomas Schelling's racial segregation model, for which he coined the term "Tipping Point" 30 years before Malcolm Gladwell popularized it:
Schelling, T. (1969). Models of segregation. The American Economic Review, 59(2), 488-493
(Schelling won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005)
A recent New Yorker article "The Truth Wears Off" is based on the same mathematical fact - that statistical tests are being used wrongly in psychology experiments and (more worryingly) in clinical trials.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...
May 2025: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/screwwor...
June 2026: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/06/screwworm-proble...