1. Josh Tyrangiel’s most recent column on AI begins as follows: “Would you like to know when you’re going to die?” He goes on to discuss a research paper entitled Using Sequences of Life-Events to Predict Human Lives,” published in Nature Computational Science in December:
A group of Danish and American social scientists announced that with artificial intelligence and a huge data set, they were able to predict the likelihood of a person’s death within the next four years with startling accuracy. “Using Sequences of Life-Events to Predict Human Lives,” published in Nature Computational Science in December, was like a Christmas gift from Blumhouse. The internet exploded with reports of a super-creepy AI “doom calculator.” Overnight, the paper became the most famous Danish rumination on mortality since “To be or not to be.”
Josh’s piece goes on to explain how the doom calculator was built — its foundations and calculations. It ends with this:
Denmark and other countries that combine AI with rich data sets will be able to play Moneyball at a national level. By finding unique correlations between life events, they’ll manage budgets and direct social services for their citizens with incredible efficiency. Nerdtopia is coming.
Good advice: Read the whole thing. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
2. Fintan O’Toole:
The term “gerontocracy” was coined in 1828 by Jean-Jacques Fazy, a Swiss republican, in the title of his book De la gérontocratie. He jeered that, in political terms, “France has been reduced to seven to eight thousand eligible individuals, asthmatic, gouty, paralytic, impaired, and only aspiring to rest.” In the contemporary US, the gerontocracy seems even more exclusive and its membership even older than the one that was swept away in France by the July Revolution of 1830. The baby boomers who sang along with Bob Dylan when he warned, “Senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall,” now linger in the lobbies.
Age has not withered their appetite for power. In 2014 the US elected the oldest Congress in its history. The record did not last long: It was broken in 2016. And then again in 2018. And yet again in 2020, when—remarkably—the majority of the incumbents who lost their seats were replaced by someone even older. In the 2022 midterms, the House did become slightly younger (the mean age of representatives dropped by a year, from fifty-nine to fifty-eight), but the mean age of senators continued to rise and is now over sixty-five…
In early November The New York Times published a poll that showed Trump ahead in five of the six swing states. It found that 62 percent of respondents did not think Biden had “the mental sharpness” to be effective as president and that 71 percent thought him “too old”—an opinion shared even by 54 percent of Biden’s own supporters. While polling may not be a reliable indicator of voting intentions this far from Election Day, it seems foolish to pretend that Biden’s age is not a serious obstacle…..
Biden is not just chronologically old—he is politically ancient. Trump has clocked less than a decade in the electoral arena. Biden has been around for half a century as senator, vice-president, Democratic primary candidate, and president. He launched his first bid for the presidency in 1987, when today’s median American was four years old.
Those who now make light of his verbal slips note, as Franklin Foer does in his recent book The Last Politician, that the problem is less “Biden’s age or acuity” and more “his indiscipline and imprecision, traits that stalked the entirety of his career.” This may well be true, but reminding voters that Biden was always thus is no great help when that “always” seems to stretch back into what is, for most of today’s voters, a fuzzy prehistory. Biden’s longevity in public office means that, unlike Trump, he can appear as an embodiment of the gerontocracy that Americans do not want but have ended up with anyway…..
(Biden) is caught in a generational paradox. He does not, in electoral terms, actually represent the boomers: a majority of “old white people” voted for Trump in 2020 and will, if given the chance, surely do so again in 2024. But he can be seen nonetheless as a representative boomer figure, the most prominent and powerful embodiment of the demographic group that has dominated American wealth, politics, and culture since the 1970s. He suffers on both sides of this contradiction—most of his own generation does not identify with him, but many younger Americans identify him with the age-related injustices that have shaped their lives. It is this incongruity that makes Biden so vulnerable. Being the old white man brings him no rewards, only resentments. And resentment is the medium in which Trump thrives.
Yet Biden himself does not seem to have much awareness of the seriousness of this threat to his reelection. He has little instinctive sympathy with the specific struggles of younger Americans. In 2018, when he was briefly out of public office, he told Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times:
“The younger generation now tells me how tough things are—give me a break! No, no, I have no empathy for it, give me a break! Because here’s the deal, guys, we decided we were going to change the world, and we did.”
That “we” is an explicitly generational identity. In Biden’s mind, he and his age cohort changed the world in much tougher circumstances than those that millennials and Gen Z face today. He seems barely conscious of the implication that it’s their fault if they fail to change it again….
Trump’s senescence and mental fitness will not be an effective issue for the Democrats. Derangement, in his mad-avenger persona, is good. It is, rather, the Democrats, if they are led by an eighty-one-year-old man, who will have to bear the burden of America’s generational divide. Gerontocracy—in reality a bipartisan phenomenon—will be their brand. (Source: nybooks.com)
3. The Future (according to Nicolai Tangen):
Norway’s $1.5 trillion sovereign wealth fund is bracing for lackluster performance from the markets in the years to come as inflationary pressures are likely to remain.
“We are not very optimistic when it comes to returns,” Chief Executive Officer Nicolai Tangen said in an interview on Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“There is more underlying inflationary pressure and I think it’s going to stay there for longer,” he said. “I do think the international central banks will be very, very careful in cutting rates too quickly because they were too slow in putting them up.”
Created in the 1990s to invest Norway’s oil and gas revenues abroad, the fund — also known as Norges Bank Investment Management — is the world’s biggest single owner of equities. NBIM today holds stakes in over 9,000 companies, or about 1.5% of all shares in the world’s listed companies, as well as assets in fixed income, real estate and renewable infrastructure. That gives the fund a unique view on the health of the markets.
“We’ve got some underlying inflationary pressures, we’ve got wages demand really high in a lot of countries, and that should lead to some spiraling of inflation going forward,” Tangen said Monday. “Then we have some climate effects, which are negative on pricing, you have geopolitics, you have trade routes, many things — it’s just not a very happy cocktail.” (Source: bloomberg.com)