Four For Friday | Aug 30, 2024
Four For Friday | Aug 30, 2024
LF137 | Financing systems change - the Pando Fund, California's AI bill, reducing antimicrobial resistance, intergenerational care vilage + Amazon's cost savings with AI
Welcome to Looking Forward’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week. Enjoy!
🏝️ Note: Last week’s LF was skipped due to holiday with the family in rural Suffolk. A real change of scene.
Financing system health - the Pando Fund
The world’s largest tree, Pando, is formed from a collection of 47,000 trunks across 106 acres, connected by a single root system that has grown over 9,000 years. This is a lovely metaphor for a fund that Rob Ricigliano and Anna Muiro are proposing to support systems change efforts at scale. You can’t expect a tree to survive without ensuring it has strong and stable roots, yet these underground ‘enabling conditions’ are often not funded by philanthropists who prefer the shiny objects.
The proposal, that is starting to be workshopped in a series of design sprints, suggests a fund to support a backbone organization, the enabling conditions (both ‘core’ / general ones and ‘context-specific’ ones relating to the mission at hand), and then clusters of projects within an integrated portfolio.
This draws on their earlier essay from last year, laying the ground work for systems investing. The following table points to the difference between funding systems change and funding point solutions:
So What? Another helpful narrative that recognizes the importance of new funding vehicles that direct capital to systems change.
The problem with California’s AI bill
AI superhero Andrew Ng uses a platform in TIME to succinctly point to a serious flaw in California’s new AI bill, it regulates an underlying technology rather than the application:
Consider the electric motor. It can be used to build a blender, electric vehicle, dialysis machine, or guided bomb. It makes more sense to regulate a blender, rather than its motor. Further, there is no way for an electric motor maker to guarantee no one will ever use that motor to design a bomb. If we make that motor manufacturer liable for nefarious downstream use cases, it puts them in an impossible situation.
So What? A useful way to think about regulating things in general to focus on the application layer not the core technology.
Destroying antibacterial resistance
Seems like some good news for those working to addressing antibacterial resistance. It’s now possible to use bacteria to break down the genes that allow waste water to be a breeding ground for antibacterial resistance.
So What? AMR is a huge issue that’s still under the radar. More prize funding and coordinated work is needed here.
An ‘intergenerational care village’
In the UK city of Chester, another example of the universally-loved-but-oddly-underused idea of intergenerational care homes. A care home for people with dementia has a nursery for infants and toddlers on the ground floor.
Spontaneous, casual happenings, like informal conversations and run-ins in the bistro or hallways, as well as planned activities such as choir and storytime, allow for elderly residents and children to come together in a variety of ways.
So What? It’s time that intergenerational engagement went from a fun admired pilot to the default way of delivering services to both older and younger people.
Bonus - AI Stat of the Week
Amazon saved 4,500 developer years of work using AI to help their tecchies ship faster and more accurate code
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen