Climate Change’s Most Important Gas? Oxygen! Christine Lagarde’s Inner Paddington. The #AI Doom Machine – Plus More! #185
Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck – welcome!
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1️⃣ The Climate Risk We’re Ignoring
It’s not CO2, it’s oceans and oxygen.
Craig Venter is a scientific explorer. He’s mapped the human genome. Now he’s exploring the world’s oceans looking for DNA.
What he’s found is a stark reminder that climate change has unintended consequences.
“We discovered far more organisms in the ocean than there are stars and planets in the universe.
“These organisms produce about 50% of the oxygen that we breathe, so to survive we need to preserve that environmental resource.
“Changing the ocean temperature by only one degree can kill off certain types of bacteria that make life on the planet Earth liveable.
“Everybody’s worried about the sea level rise from climate change. That is certainly going to be important. Far worse will happen if we wipe out the producers of oxygen.”
This is part of a wide-ranging interview that takes in gene-editing, synthetic biology and microbes and is very well worth your time.
⏭ The first gene-editing treatment is up for approval.
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2️⃣ Don’t Believe the #AI Doomer Hype
A warning from a top scientist.
Yann LeCun is one of a trio of scientists associated with the #AI revolution. He’s also the only one fuelling panic about existential sci-fi risks from chatbots.
This week – as the US signed an executive order on the technology, and the UK gathered a meeting of would-be regulators – he wrote:
“I very much support open AI platforms because I believe in a combination of forces: people’s creativity, democracy, market forces, and product regulations.
“I also know that producing AI systems that are safe and under our control is possible.
If powerful AI systems are driven by objectives (which include guardrails) they will be safe and controllable because we set those guardrails and objectives.
“In a future where AI systems are poised to constitute the repository of all human knowledge and culture, we need the platforms to be open source and freely available.
“The alternative, which will inevitably happen if open source AI is regulated out of existence, is that a small number of companies from the West Coast of the US and China will control AI...
“What does that mean for democracy? What does that mean for cultural diversity?This is what keeps me up at night.”
To declare my interests, whilst I advise MBZUAI (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence) I don’t speak for them. If you want to follow a thoughtful researcher and commentator on cutting edge #AI, try university president Eric Xing.
⏭ “Big Tech is Lying About AI Extinction Risk.”
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3️⃣ Christine Lagarde’s Leadership Secrets
She shares something in common with Paddington.
Christine Lagarde would make any top three list of the world’s most powerful and respected women leaders. A lawyer who became France’s Finance minister, she ran the International Monetary Fund, and now runs the European Central Bank.
She also runs rings around interviewers. An FT profile starts with her disarming gesture:
“Christine Lagarde hands over a small white paper bag with something surprisingly heavy inside after sweeping through the restaurant with her customary assured elegance.
“Taking off her black leather gloves before shaking hands — there’s a slight chill on this overcast day in Frankfurt — she explains: ‘It is marmalade I made with grapefruits from our garden in Corsica.’”
Home-made marmalade, it turns out, is the key to securing benevolent media coverage. Paddington would be proud. The substance?
“In August, Lagarde said a fragmentation of the world economy into competing geopolitical blocs was complicating the task of policymakers.
“Could this fragmenting world threaten the US dollar’s dominance as a reserve currency and in global trade, as Lagarde suggested in a speech in April?
“The risk comes from widening north-south divisions ‘and if we see China rallying the south materially’, especially with ‘Brazil and India and some of the Middle East countries that are trying to decide transactions in local currencies’.”
I’ve had a chance to see how Lagarde operates behind closed doors and she’s as charming, tough, and dedicated a public servant as you could hope for. And no marmalade was involved in that endorsement.
⏭ Why women are still under-represented at the top.
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4️⃣ 1977, Punk Rock and Chinese Prime Ministers
No future for you.
Li Keqiang – who died this week – went to university in 1977, the year the Sex Pistols released their debut album. Not such a big deal you might think.
You‘d be wrong. In China it was the first time since the Mao era that students had to pass exams to go to college. Here’s a great piece on what that meant.
How important were those exams? MIT professor Yasheng Huang says they are key to understanding China’s success over millennia.
“Huang dates China’s strongly centralised political system not from Mao Zedong’s creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, but to the Sui dynasty in 587 and the start of the country’s Keju examinations, which provided merit-based access to the imperial civil service...
“Successive administrations used such tests to homogenise their otherwise disparate territories, setting up a centralised exam system that has endured, in one form or another, virtually ever since.
“Today, the CCP bristles with selective party schools and leadership academies... the country’s notoriously taxing gaokao college entrance exams act as a gateway to its most elite universities, and in turn to Beijing’s prized central bureaucracy.”
Li spoke good English. He was serious and engaging and could crack a joke – though not on a public stage.
⏭ Funerals have often created tense moments in Chinese politics.
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5️⃣ Secrets of Superconductivity
It really, really needs cold.
⏭ Room temperature superconductivity remains a sci-fi dream.
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6️⃣ Overcoming Electric Car Range Anxiety
The sun always shines on EV – at least when racing down under.
⏭ Where are the solar powered cars?
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7️⃣ Shakespeare Improv
Judi Dench does a sonnet from memory. It’ll make your week.
⏭ More reading on Bea’s book club podcast.
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If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it!
Best,
Adrian
