Newsletter Archive

Future-oriented leaders will see risks less as passive stochastic numbers to integrate into a formula, and more as decisions that individuals make around us.

For the most part, what I saw at the UN were people working very hard under very difficult constraints and countervailing incentives to bring about as much peace and prosperity as humanly possible.

We hosted the second-annual Lux AI Summit this week in New York City, bringing together several hundred researchers, engineers and builders to exchange knowledge at the frontiers of AI, from product development and protein folding to server infrastructure and modern war.

This has been a blistering week of news; it’s also been a blistering week in the sun for me at our Lux team offsite. Here’s a run-down of the 10 most important stories I saw this week.

Survivor mode is a culture that can and should be engrained in the sociology of any group of people, because it’s essentially the pathway to success.

America’s eccentricity is that its economy is nonpareil, even as it squanders that dynamism with some of the most comparatively mediocre institutions and infrastructure in the industrialized world.

The invention of CRISPR-Cas9 a decade ago paved the way for xenotransplantation to make the transition from science fiction to science fact and take the lead in this technological race.

This quarter’s letter is a clarion call for scientific advancement (and all who foster, find, fund and benefit from it) as the cornerstone of our collective future.

Not only are we humans inept at making predictions in high-noise environments — we also struggle to distinguish between moments when our predictions are based on expertise versus those that are not.

My primordial soup thesis is simple: regions like Shenzhen and others combine a deep bench of engineering talent with dense markets for these engineers to buy cheap components and then create, test and cook their ideas.

I am down in Tampa Bay in the post-Tropical Storm Debby wetlands and so no column this week, but lots of recommendations and new podcast episodes.

Shahin Farshchi and Dario Soatto have brought together their collective wisdom on the future of automating chip design and how new technologies may contain the spiraling costs at ever-smaller chip nodes

It is not easy to pick up your whole life and move to China, nor is it something I’d recommend for everyone. But if you are an individual who wants to have a global impact and help navigate the precarious geopolitical and global technological future, there is no better way to understand.

How Medium is finding a new path in media economics, how Kristoffer Tjalve is rebuilding the "poetic web', and five recommended readings for the weekend.

One of the key lessons of Riskgaming is that it’s not nearly enough to inform people about complex and technical issues, since the underlying negotiations between different parties are ultimately what constructs the final outcome. Why can some parties extract their rents, and others either don’t, won’t or can’t?

Lots of Lux Recommends and three podcasts for the lengthy holiday weekend.

The debate boiled down to economics and systems versus culture and philosophy. Do rational incentives win, or will students and new workers choose a different course even if it means giving up a bump in salary or the comfort of an air-conditioned albeit stale cubicle?

As the U.S. and China continue to saber rattle in the South China Sea and in other regions, it is imperative that the U.S. starts to take the necessary economic security measures to better insulate the American economy from a future crisis or conflict.

LLMs will dominate the administration of more and more of the world, and it’s a recurring pattern of history that local and regional languages are ultimately subsumed by dominant administrative languages.

Unfortunately, a patchwork of small niches doesn’t construct an advanced economy anymore than a startup can hope to cobble together a dozen products into a competitive business. To succeed at scale means finding large niches and conquering them.

Having just spent two weeks in Taipei, I witnessed the mass protests currently underway across the city in opposition to controversial legislation that was ultimately passed by the Legislative Yuan

I’m on vacation the next week and a half in the Republic of China.

The primary focus was a series of loose, unconference-style breakout sessions, offering Lux’s leaders the chance to strategize and plan with their peers across the Lux portfolio.

In an era defined by social media, political polarization, insatiable consumerism and instant gratification, could we ever make the same sacrifices as the fittingly-titled greatest generation did?

The Great Talent Dividend is rapidly changing the geographies and companies that are demanded by employees. Adapt, and gain the future. Or ignore the change at your peril.

With riskgaming, I wanted to build a unique experience from the ground up that took advantage of the best practices from the defense strategy world while opening these experiences up to the wide range of leaders that Lux engages with at the intersection of science, business and policy.

President Joe Biden rolled out as extensive a red carpet as the U.S. can possibly offer to a foreign leader to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

For countries like India, which desperately needs hundreds of millions of middle-class jobs, AI is an employment disaster in the making. Workforce analysts have identified outsourcing in service markets like call centers, data entry, business process automation and broader IT support as among the industries most likely to be replaced by AI in the next few years.

Right now, there are thousands of children dreaming about the potential of artificial intelligence, learning and thinking and building the future here and wanting to be part of one of the great transformational epochs that humanity has ever produced. Why would we want to do anything that might dampen that curiosity and passion through laws that force these children to log off and … do something else?

Rather than focusing on censoring AI models, we should be fortifying our efforts on biodefense.

These “sigma narratives” take advantage of normal accidents multiple standard deviations away from the median, challenging editors to choose between offering readers the latest thrilling update or offering a more accurate view of a system.

There is a values tradeoff between freedom of speech and market exchange as well as national security. Technology has a way of creating dilemmas, and we are utterly failing to take those dilemmas head on and own our own destiny.

The global policeman suddenly had a far larger and more sophisticated band of criminals to thwart. Yet, the way in which America conducts its foreign policy has not changed.

Today, not a single city in America or Canada has a world-class subway system, although New York’s is certainly among the most extensive. What went wrong?

The occasional megaproject — well-designed, well-planned and well-executed — has the ability to transform our lives for the better.

Journalists and media critics have been shrill about the deleterious state of media economics, and that alarm is deserved: quality journalism is extraordinarily hard to do in the best of circumstances and now it is no longer viable.

All of this optimistic speculation can make one delirious at possibility, and so it’s helpful every once in a while to take a step back from the speculative frontiers and instead examine our known reality.

The upshot of network effects is the density of talent; the downside is groupthink, of too many people watching the same presentations at the same conferences and coming away convinced on a single approach to the future.

Eig manages to turn the textbook icon back into a man, reminding us all that even the greatest historical figures do indeed walk amongst us — if often ahead of us.

The single most important ingredient to a region’s economic success is the talent of the people who choose to reside there

AI was a recurring theme this year, as was international relations and the rise (and more specifically, falls) of the United Kingdom and Canada. But if there was one thread tying “Securities” together this year, it was employment, jobs and the meaning of work.

2024 is shaping up to be a year in which the history has already in some ways been written. The seeds of the past are germinating into a world-altering, globe-spanning epochal year.

Canada is now nestled next to a revisionist Russia, which is bulking up its presence in the Arctic by reopening previously shuttered Soviet bases while also modernizing its navy and undertaking military drills in the region. Eight of Russia’s eleven submarines carrying long-range nuclear weapons are thought to be based in the Arctic.

The passing of both men is a sad bookend to a century of achievement, but it’s also an opening for new intellects to build or dismantle their stances and legacies as appropriate. Finance and foreign policy will never be the same.

Fire is destructive, but it is also the fuel for the wick that lights our dinner tables and illuminates humanity’s best path forward. Cherish the present and aspire toward the future.

BRICS is hardly alone, for there is an alphabet soup of international pseudo-organizations and confabs (IPEF, APEC, G20, AU, RCEP, SCO, and CTSO come to mind) which do nothing more than have world leaders rub shoulders, engage in a photo op and argue over the wording of a closing memorandum no country will abide by anyway.

Regulators want to kill the future of artificial intelligence. That’s my only conclusion after a blistering week of global regulatory attacks.

Each problem is a palimpsest of the human impulse to fix, layers upon layers of solutions that couldn’t quite reach the finish line.

If India and China see each other as systemic rivals both regionally and globally, then bluntly, how could they possibly coordinate in a group meant to counter Western hegemony?

Acts that erase innocent human lives — and their unwritten futures — unjustly bludgeon individuals into a blur of indiscriminate group identity.