Chronicles of the Future – 19 July 2024

Artificial intelligence

99% cheaper

OpenAI have launched GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient small model that achieves better results than GPT-3.5 Turbo (the previous small model), for less than half the cost.

AI discourse is often dominated by new models’ capabilities, but I think the collapse in OpenAI’s pricing is potentially just as important. For example, the cost per token of GPT-4o mini has dropped by 99% since text-davinci-003, a less capable model in 2022. What other technologies have experienced such efficiency gains in a two year period?

While most news stories focus on AI ‘wow’ moments, businesses are looking for cost-efficient ways of implementing this technology. Models like the GPT-4o mini will help them do it.

Had enough of EU

Meta will withhold its next multimodal AI model – and future ones – from customers in the European Union because of “the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment”. This shows a growing willingness among US tech giants to withhold products from European customers, with Meta following Apple’s decision not to roll out Apple Intelligence due to regulatory concerns.

EU grandstanding about being the regulatory leader in the world (whatever that means) now looks like an own goal.

New team member

An online lifestyle magazine was the cause of a strange controversy midweek, when it was forced to quickly ‘fire’ an “AI enhanced team member.” Exactly what they meant by this was never clear. One can imagine it might have been doing some copywriting.

Whatever they meant, people didn’t like it, and they swiftly issued an apology.

Some commentators were quick to take the line that “no one wants” this technology. As we’ve discussed before, I think that misunderstands what this technology will mainly be used for. It’s not an entertainment product, but a functional capability that can help businesses and individuals improve their productivity and certain outputs.

What Sheerluxe got wrong is thinking that their readers would care about how technology is improving what will always be the backend of their business. Not all processes need to be communicated.

Climate change

End of carbon sinks

A new paper submitted to Cornell University found that plants and soils absorbed almost zero carbon in 2023, despite record emissions, in what they call “the collapse of the land carbon sink.”

The graphic below, which they used to demonstrate their findings, is a little confusing, but the part to look at is the shrinking light green part of the bar graph on the lower axis. This represents how almost zero carbon was absorbed on land in 2023.

The consequences of this are severe. As Dr Robert Rohde, Chief Scientist as Berkley Earth, put it, “I don't say this in a mean way, but I really hope this paper is simply wrong. A rapid deterioration of the land carbon sink in the near future could have really ugly consequences.”

The land sink exists because higher carbon dioxide usually encourages plant growth, but in 2023 high temperatures (and associated drought and wildfire) reportedly did so much damage to ecosystems that almost no net carbon was absorbed on land, removing a major mitigating factor to climate change.

As Dr Rohde said, I really hope this paper is simply wrong.

Lab grown meat

The UK is set to become the first country in Europe to commercialise ‘lab-grown’ meat after regulators approved chicken cultivated from animal cells for use in pet food. One brand, Meatly, will begin selling its cultivated or cultured chicken to manufacturers as early as this year.

I’ve been a proponent of lab grown meat as a climate friendly alternative for some time, so I’m pleased to see this development. There’s one thing missing, however, and that’s that we still haven’t legalised the consumption of it, so I’m not entirely sure who Meatly will be allowed to sell to.

Presuming we resolve this, lab grown meat will be a great opportunity for the UK. We’re one of the first countries to move on the regulation (apart from Singapore and Israel, and, in some states, the US), we’re leaders in the science, we have existing companies, and, perhaps more importantly, we don’t have a strangely powerful meat lobby pushing back (as is happening in the States).

Think it’s hot in London?

If you find yourself having a moan about the heat in London today, with temperatures surpassing 30 degrees Celsius, spare a thought for those in Dubai, which broke its temperature record with a ridiculous 62.2 degrees Celsius. That’s right, double.

Demographics

JD Vance

Donald Trump, the Republican’s confirmed nominee and the likely next President, selected his running mate, JD Vance, author of the acclaimed Hillbilly Elegy. Vance is an interesting man for a lot of reasons, but I want to focus on his longstanding view that low birth rates are a bad thing.

In 2019, before he ran for office, he said: “Do people look to the future and see a place worth having children in? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a good roof over that kid’s head, food on the table, and provide that child with a good education? By every statistic that we have, people are answering ‘no’ to all of those questions. Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.”

More recently, he has argued that instead of giving votes to 16 year olds – as the Democrats and the British Labour Party want to – we should give votes to all children, but then give control of those votes to their parents.

Controversial though it may be, I’m not fundamentally opposed to the idea. I think having a stake in a country’s future is critical for a functioning democracy, and parents are undeniably in a different position to the childless. Practically, however, left wing political movements would do everything they could to avoid it, with their voters swinging massively towards lower fertility demographics.

Months from a milestone

The ONS reported that in England and Wales there were only 400 more births than deaths in the year to mid-2023, the lowest figure since 1978 (which seems to have been an anomaly year, but I haven’t been able to find an explanation why).   

This means that we are likely only months from there being more deaths than births (if we haven’t reached that point already), signalling the beginning of natural population decline. From then on, without a radical increase in the fertility rate, the UK’s population will only be sustained by immigration.

Mo money mo babies

There was an interesting research article in VoxDev, a development economics organisation, which showed that when African women get richer, they have more babies, not fewer. Indeed, they often had fewer children than they desired. This turns the standard theory that women in poverty have more children than they want to on its head. I’d be interested in seeing more on this given the effort development agencies continue to put on reducing birth rates in developing countries.

Women and children first?

I was shocked to see this graphic showing a gender breakdown of UK asylum applicants from Afghanistan. The ratio is repeated across many other countries.

Given asylum is granted for humanitarian reasons (or occasionally political), I think many would be uncomfortable with this intake. Are these the most vulnerable people that we should be prioritising? Are there women and children who are unable to access the system as it stands? And to what extent does this data suggest that some asylum seekers are more like economic migrants? These seem like important questions to answer before we make statements – like Rory Stewart did this week – that we should increase our asylum quota to a “sensible” 350,000 a year (0.5% of the population).