(2021-06-15) Clifford: AI Authors, Better Ways To Fund Startups, China's Digital Silk Road And More

Matthew Clifford: TiB-169: AI authors; better ways to fund startups; China's "Digital Silk Road"; and more... What it might it be like to be an artist in a world where machines can create art as well as humans can? Novelist and neuroscientist Erik Hoel (yes, the one I wrote about last week) has a new piece on this topic. To show how close we are already, he has AI writer GPT-3 (see TiB 119 and TiB 124) “rewrite” a passage from his novel; the results are impressive

One way of thinking about how the world will adapt is to look at a field where machines long ago surpassed humans: chess.

There was a brief window in which there was excitement that the combination of human and machine (so-called “centaurs”) was better at chess than either. This didn’t last long, as we discussed in TiB 136. Today, humans add nothing to the partnership, thanks to DeepMind’s AlphaZero.

I suspect a world of abundant AI authorship actually raises the status of the best human authors, and creates new markets in curation, personalisation and artisanal “machine-free” stories.

Can we design better ways to fund startups?

Last year in TiB 129 I wrote about designing an “Optimal Kickstarter” for public goods, based on this post by Matt Clancy. I pointed to Alex Tabarrok’s idea of Dominant Assurance Contracts (DACs) as one of intellectual antecedents of this concept

In many non-US ecosystems, government is the largest investor in VC funds. I wonder what would happen if some of this capital was redirected to refund bonuses. Not only might it be cheaper, but I suspect it might end up with a more diverse set of founders getting funded. It would, at minimum, be an interesting experiment.