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Anthropic Economic Index
Good nyewwws everyone!
The main findings from the Economic Index’s first paper are:
- Today, usage is concentrated in software development and technical writing tasks. Over one-third of occupations (roughly 36%) see AI use in at least a quarter of their associated tasks, while approximately 4% of occupations use it across three-quarters of their associated tasks.
- AI use leans more toward augmentation (57%), where AI collaborates with and enhances human capabilities, compared to automation (43%), where AI directly performs tasks.
- AI use is more prevalent for tasks associated with mid-to-high wage occupations like computer programmers and data scientists, but is lower for both the lowest- and highest-paid roles. This likely reflects both the limits of current AI capabilities, as well as practical barriers to using the technology.
I'm entering my Man In Tech Trying To Learn As Much About AI As He Can era and I use Claude.ai pretty much daily to explain to me what circular queues are and how to un-gzip archives on the command line, so this is pretty much what I expected.
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Now: 10 February - 16 February 2025
The week started out slow but ramped up in a major way. Tuesday we were at Scouts for the second half of my lesson on space. I was pretty nervous about it but it went well.
Thursday I was down in Leeds for an all-hands at work. I really like going down to the office and seeing folks face to face. I just know that if I lived within cycling distance I’d be down there multiple times per week. I think I’m going to have to come to terms with being an In-Person Work Guy.
On the weekend Sam and I went out to the Pennines: she started walking the Teesdale Way and I did a big loop over Cross Fell.
Spent Sunday recovering; I spent a while on the computer doing Administrative Tasks and then drank three beers and signed up for a 50k in the Lake District in May.
Reading
I liked this article on Dialectics of Decline, I feel it’s probably being shared around left-learning circles with nods and approval but there’s a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done on Our Side as well:
On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns.
Still, a perverse voyeurism in “soy right” pictures shared by Max Read on the same topic.
In other widely-shared news, Kevin Kelly’s list of 50 years of travel tips got me wanting to get back on a plane and go somewhere:
Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.
[...]
Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.
Gina Trapani’s Life in Weeks is a terrific high-level visualisation of life (that doesn’t make you go “oh my god I’m basically dead already”). This, along with the question on the citizenship application about tell us every time you left the country in the past five years, makes me want to build something like this for myself. See also Buster Benson’s Life in Weeks.
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Under-cabinet motion-sensing USB-C LED light bars
You know Pinterest. You know when you see immaculately-shot interiors on Pinterest. You know when you spend loads of money trying to make your house look like one of those immaculate shots. You know when it doesn't, and you wonder what's missing.
What's missing is Under-Cabinet Motion Sensing USB-C Light Bars, which it turns out you can buy on eBay for like £4 each. They're so Available over there on eBay that I'm not even going to link you to them. You mount them underneath your cabinets—bathroom, kitchen, garage workspace—and voilà with a wave of your hand under its motion sensing eye, your house instantly becomes immaculate.
I didn't even bother cleaning up. You can't tell. It's just so I M M A C U L A T E
Forget HomeKit. Forget Home Assistant. Forget all these guys. The immaculate home is smooth-brained, motion-sensing, and has a tiny onboard battery charged via USB.
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Now: 3 February - 9 February 2025
Led a lesson on space at Scouts on Tuesday; was very nervous leading up to it but it turned swimmingly. With a little guidance kids will basically teach themselves, it feels like. Maybe it’s just the good kind of kids that go to Scouts.
On Wednesday night I was feeling a little peckish so I made an entire bag of sugarfree cookie dough mix. The cookies tasted like chemicals and the sugar simulate made my insides roil. At least the mix is no longer in the cupboard, tempting me.
I got a new pair of running shoes at the end of last week, and spent this week breaking them in. Road shoes! Not to be found on my Footwear Bingo card for 2025. I took them out for a long run at the weekend as a sort of dress rehearsal for an upcoming marathon and was pleasantly surprised. The Shoe Industry will make a conventional runner of me yet.
Spent the rest of the weekend eating—first a Jamaican takeaway (from Easington of all places!) and then a homemade barbecue out of the 4 Rivers cookbook. I consider a ruined baking tin a small price to pay for better pork than most British people will eat in their entire lives.
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Max wealth
From Hamilton Nolan: why not cap the amount of wealth someone can accrue?
Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of more than $200 billion, far more than his descendants could ever spend in several generations, he continues to make his primary product worse because it will make him more money. This, though we do not always think of it this way, is the consequence of having no limit to the accumulation of wealth.
So given that we've all decided that we don't want to spend the net output of humanity on making a set of 9 guys unfathomably powerful, how should we reorient our priorities?
Such a limit on net worth would eliminate the incentive of every single tech CEO, already rich, to get richer. By default, the AI industry would need another goal. The question guiding the evolution of the technology could be, “How do we use this powerful technology to make lives better?” The new drugs it discovered would be distributed with an eye towards the public good rather than towards the infinite generation of profits. The drudge work that it automates could be paid back to the public in the form of shorter hours for the same pay, rather than having those gains taken by CEOs and investors, while workers were stuck with fewer jobs. And on, and on.
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