Alice Mayhew

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on the atlas — 36

highlights — 168

On employment creation, AI will make it easy for 50mn Americans to be re-employed as micro-entrepreneurs by 2035, with AI handling finance, legal, marketing requirements and taxes so each person can pursue their craft. The human touch, provenance-rich, artisanal, will probably be valued over pure utility. Status, social capital, reputation, competition and mastery of a skill will be what people strive for. The majority of today’s jobs are servitude to survival, the opposite of human dignity.
We will need a new tax code for the wealth AI creates
Instead of assuming that the answer is grand new state bureaucracies like Great British Energy or Great British Railways, we should be building capacity that stands beyond the political and financial boundaries of government: institutions that can outlast administrations, attract multiple forms of capital, and serve the public interest permanently.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
‘Charitable’ and ‘mission driven’ do not need to mean small. Lloyds of London. Novo Nordisk. Both are global companies, but locked into a structure that secures their governance for public good.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
Demand side support: a commitment to be ‘customer zero’ for the innovations the market or society need. Supply side support: direct support for early stage innovations, including proof of concept and first of a kind trials. Financing availability: equity investment and loan support for start-up and scale-up innovations, which for civil society can be enabled by Better Society Capital. Learning infrastructure and regulatory space: access to data and opportunities to test and learn with regulators and commissioners.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
It rests on four interconnected components, which can each be seen in programmes like Sovereign AI, the National Security Strategic Innovation Fund, and the UKRI Missions Accelerator:
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
I’m talking about building up things that the nation wants, but the government doesn’t directly control. So my starting intellectual model is not public service reform but industrial strategy, for which there is an increasingly clear playbook.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
what to do with a national glut of courgettes or how to manage logistics for perishables across multiple sites. What other great local provision could be enabled by building this kind of ‘spine’?
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
Local media is the informational infrastructure of democratic life, and it remains in crisis. I often wish Facebook had gone local, making the most of its unique insight into who lives near whom and shares their interests; it could have been the dominant force for rebuilding community life. But instead it turned into ad slop and misinformation provision for the elderly. Imagination and talent is now going into great local reporting with outlets like Manchester Mill and London Centric, but philanthropy should be getting behind them at scale, just as Victorians did.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
It would build expertise by working across many of them, develop standard approaches that reduce costs without sacrificing quality, and go relentlessly after the sites with social as well as economic value, because its board is not required to make a profit, just recycle capital for public good.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
What Britain needs is a mission-driven developer, founded and capitalised by a new George Peabody that specialises in small urban sites.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
But small sites have high costs: complex planning, difficult ground conditions, bespoke design requirements, awkward logistics. Large private housebuilders will not touch them because the margins are too thin. Small developers will, but they lack the capacity to build expertise across multiple sites, and their cost of capital is higher.
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
Residential care shares much of the same market structure: high-touch human services running inside real estate businesses. The people you are caring for – whether they are frail elderly, learning disabled, or children in care - are vulnerable. The buildings they live in are the assets on the balance sheet. In a purely commercial model, the incentive is always to sweat the asset and cut the care - to do the minimum that regulation requires and bank the rest. We have watched this dynamic play out in children’s homes for two decades: a market dominated by a small number of private equity-backed …
Alternative Provision - by Polly Mackenzie
Schneider Electric has designed an AI tool to support electricians and electrical engineers as they troubleshoot machinery and circuitry. The tool draws on images, hardware information, and a database of documented problems to suggest next steps for field technicians. According to the report, engineers use the tool to cut the average time needed to complete maintenance reports in half. But the pro-worker case is not simply that the tool saves time; it also helps workers apply their expertise more effectively in the field.
Pro-worker AI, explained | MIT Sloan
A more useful test is whether the technology creates new opportunities for workers to apply judgment, build expertise, and take on more valuable tasks.
Pro-worker AI, explained | MIT Sloan
The researchers’ assessment is cautious: If the tool only helps examiners do the same work faster, it may primarily reduce the amount of examiner time needed for a given task, creating a labor-saving efficiency gain. But if it allows them to perform deeper analysis and better evaluate applications, it can make their specialized judgment more valuable.
Pro-worker AI, explained | MIT Sloan
New task-creating technologies are different because they expand the range of valuable work that humans can do. In electrical work, for example, technologies such as Ethernet networks, fiber-optic cabling, and occupancy-aware heating and lighting systems increased the complexity of modern buildings and created demand for specialized expertise to plan, install, and maintain those systems.
Pro-worker AI, explained | MIT Sloan
The Brookings report offers a framework for understanding how different technologies affect workers, identifying five broad categories: labor-augmenting, capital-augmenting, automating, expertise-leveling, and new task-creating technologies. Only new task-creating technologies are “unambiguously pro-worker,”
Pro-worker AI, explained | MIT Sloan
AI can also move in a different direction — one that extends human judgment, creates new tasks, accelerates skill acquisition, and raises the value of human expertise.
Pro-worker AI, explained | MIT Sloan
Britain still has a lot going for it – the third largest technology ecosystem in the world, a huge financial services sector, globally admired universities and respected institutions.
Can we be rich again? The extraordinary potential of Britain's economy - LSE
The mock-ups let potential buyers test how difficult the technology would be to reproduce as the cost of building software is rapidly falling, and also understand how the product could evolve.
Bain tests software takeover targets by vibecoding AI replicas
current progress 9% Ryan McMorrow in San Francisco Published14 HOURS AGO 165 Print this page Could you be the FT’s top trader?Try our new stock picking game Private equity investors are turning to AI-generated replicas of software to assess whether acquisition targets have a competitive advantage, as generative AI threatens to upend the industry.
Bain tests software takeover targets by vibecoding AI replicas
I think that the key is this point about the new activities. What can you do now that humans couldn’t previously do? In what way have your individual capabilities or your collective abilities been expanded by AI and does that convert into higher wages, better working conditions, a safer workplace?
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
I think young people getting life experiences, learning languages, travelling, understanding other people, being able to talk to people and listen face to face, and then combining these things, are going to be very valuable.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
when I meet executives who say, “this AI is overwhelming. I know it’s going to change everything, but I just don’t have time to catch up.” I say, “You need to hire a general-purpose nerd.”
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
If you’re just the RA [research assistant] who looks up stock market data from Brazil, AI can do that pretty well now. But if you’re the RA who can weave together pieces, who can solve problems, who can bring solutions quicker to the decision maker, that’s actually quite appealing.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
On Monday and Tuesday they can interview real people face to face and learn things. On Wednesday they can read a 50-year-old book that has not yet been digitised, make sense of it and figure out how you’re going to use it. On Thursday they can run a podcast. On a Friday they prepare a one-page memo for the minister.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
In the age of a new general purpose technology, AI, we need general purpose nerds, the GPN. The general purpose nerd is someone who can master the latest AI over the weekend.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
We are trying very hard at MIT to find ways to incorporate AI into the curriculum but to push harder on the entrepreneurship angle, the creation of new products and services, the development of critical thinking
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
The UK on paper has exactly the kind of workforce that you would need, the kind of training, strong universities, and a lot of experience in building global companies and very globally oriented people who speak English. These are all big positives at this moment.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
Ireland is saying you’ve got to bring your own power now, all data centres have to bring their own power.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
I think you have to build more power and the government’s certainly trying to do that.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
One of the things I’ve had many conversations about in the UK, not only with people in London, is that if we figure stuff out for the UK on healthcare, on education, on advanced manufacturing, you can then create products and services that you can sell to the world.
Simon Johnson: ‘Nobody needs as many white-collar workers as they used to’
Alice is the representation of every woman: a whole set of annotations could be added tracing Alice imagery and Alice imitation in women’s fiction, from Cathleen Schine to Virginia Woolf. (Every man identifies with Hamlet, it has been said, since every man imagines himself a disinherited monarch; every woman identifies with Alice, since every woman sees herself as the sole sane person in a world filled with lunatics who imagine themselves disinherited monarchs.)
Who Can Be Finished With Alice? | The New Yorker
Before that world came to pass, the Amodeis said they wanted to “essentially tie our hands to the mast”, and create a corporate governance structure that partially ceded control of the company to a set of financially disinterested trustees, “tasked with keeping the long-term benefit of humanity in mind”.
Anthropic’s relentless race to the top
They mostly play role-playing games that focus on storytelling, character development and tactical decision-making. There’s a quirk in their gaming technique, Daniela added. Rather than competing, the siblings play as one character, trading off with each other through the game. “People assume we’re competing, but we actually only collaborate,”
Anthropic’s relentless race to the top
This is the next level of rich that abundance-based policies can get us to: societies in which mass full-time employment is no longer the norm.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
. And you’d see a lot more small businesses, online or in the home.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
a higher share of part-time workers among those who do work, and more people entering and exiting the labor force episodically as life circumstances change
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
But there’s another possible future, and the idea of physical abundance points the way. Imagine a future in which core elements of a household budget — housing, transportation, energy, healthcare — are now so cheap that it’s possible to fund a comfortable retirement with a fraction of the lifetime working hours needed today. Imagine a social movement — or perhaps a competing variety of social movements — that seize upon this possibility and encourage lifestyles designed to minimize dependence on paid employment.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
the “economic problem” as John Maynard Keynes defined it has been solved. The threat of serious material deprivation has been pushed to the margins of life; as a result, the “permanent problem” of humanity — how to “live wisely and agreeably and well” with all our blessings — has now come into view.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
What is needed now is something clear and compelling to fight for.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
This broad-based cultural turn against the sordid excesses of online life could be the wave that carries that abundance idea from its current niche status — the preoccupation of technocratic elites — and transforms it into a genuinely popular social movement.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
Meanwhile, a couple of unexpected spurts of technological progress — rapidly declining production costs for solar and wind power, along with SpaceX’s achievement of similarly spectacular reductions in launch costs — reawakened entrepreneurial optimism and ambition in the hard-tech sector.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
The looming challenge of climate change, combined with the emergence of China as a technologically formidable adversary, posed serious and difficult challenges that could not be met with a new phone app.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
The idea of lost abundance thus ties into the disillusionment with the digital revolution — and, with it, the growing recognition of the need to reprioritize and reengage with the physical world — that has been steadily building cultural momentum over the past decade or so.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
when you look at where exactly abundance is most conspicuously lacking — namely, the movement’s central targets of housing, energy, and transportation — you see that that the common denominator is blocked action in the physical world.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
When you examine the targets for reform that the abundance movement has identified and look for the underlying causes of dysfunction, you generally find some combination of regulatory capture, where powerful insiders dominate the policymaking process and twist the rules to pad their own nests by restricting competition (and thereby limiting supply), and a lack of state capacity brought about typically by the buildup of “red tape” —
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
When you can’t afford a decent home anywhere near where you work, the economy feels broken no matter what the topline stats may say; when a big public construction project can’t get completed without huge delays and cost overruns — or maybe just can’t get completed, period — government feels broken.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
the abundance idea has taken off because of its focus on core inputs to a high-functioning economy and core elements of a typical family’s budget.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey
and the host of supply constraints that drive up healthcare costs.
Abundance of what? Abundance for what? - by Brink Lindsey