The current Pope, Leo XIV (an American and by training a mathematician, so not exactly science- and tech illiterate), has just released an encyclical (open letter to all people of goodwill) warning against the rapid and, to many, overwhelming and frightening rise of AI: see this news report. I shall not comment on any part of it right now, but I shall be glad if there is a discussion here on his various prescriptions for the future development and control of AI - before we, human beings, are actually overwhelmed and cast aside (that is a prospect at least as old as the Frankenstein story, and looks ever more likely to come true within a generation or two). It is interesting to note that giant-tech honchos were beside him as he spoke, including, notably, one of the chief officers of Anthropic. I shall be eagerly waiting for responses: what sort of Brave New World are we shaping? And shall we be able to handle it?
Also, in today's newspaper, I read that the UN has come forward with a newly designed complex and multi-dimensional measure of the progress and wealth of nations - meant to replace the many-decades long narrow focus on GDP as a catch-all; see this and this. It has been drawn up by an expert panel of fourteen, headed by the well-known Indian origin economist Kaushik Basu. Now it has been agreed among the majority of economists for a long time that GDP and its rate of growth by itself is a very unsatisfactory index of real human progress and welfare (even if you consider only 'real' and per capita incomes, and factor in purchasing power parity corrections), because it ignores too many important things, like the degree of wealth- and income inequalities, the sustainability (environmental effects) of the kind of growth we are pursuing, the contents of the basket of goods and services that we keep producing (more guns count for as much as more healthcare drugs, more roads as much as more cars, in purely financial terms), the actual quality of life that the majority of people enjoy (safety, green living spaces, gender equality, long term health security, type of education), etc. etc. So experts have been searching for better ways to measure things for a long time. However, the problem has been that most 'alternatives' fail to provide a different and much better picture of reality: the same UN's Human Development Index, based on a weighted average of three metrics, per capita income, literacy levels and life expectancy, very closely mimics the GDP figures, in the sense that ranking countries by their per capita GDP alone shows nearly the same list of countries in the same order as the HDI does, whether you look for the ten most 'developed' countries or the ten most backward ones.
On the other hand, taking too many metrics into consideration might make the measurements much more subjective/biased and much less dependable/broadly acceptable than a simple ranking based on GDP alone, as the critics of the new measure have already pointed out. So how best to measure which country is really most advanced, and how much more than others? Would anyone like a discussion on this issue?
Finally for now, any comments on episode 5 of my poetry podcast series on Spotify?
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