Four For Friday | February 28, 2025
LF162 | AI Localism, MIT's Systems Investing 101, Deep Listening, Steve Jobs' 70th & AI Tip: Lovable.
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four things that have piqued my interest this week, together with a bonus: AI Tip of The Week.
AI Localism
One of the most impactful books I’ve read in recent years was The New Localism, which makes a compelling case for local solutions in era of dysfunctional national governments. With ever more autocratic governments wielding ever more powerful AI super tools, there’s a strong case to be made seeing what ‘local AI’ would look like.
AI Globalism and Localism argues for AI governance that combines global coordination with local experimentation, i.e. "AI Localism." This article was published just over a year ago, but resonates today, as the pains of the AI Action Summit only prove.
The reality is that cities are emerging as de facto innovation hubs for practical AI governance, with places like Amsterdam and Helsinki's leading the way (both have developed ‘Algorithm Registries’). The article introduces a "AI Localism Canvas," to help cities develop local governance frameworks. The piece argues that local and global can be complementary—global frameworks with local implementation to ensure responsiveness to community needs and cultural contexts.
The So What? A bottom-up, localism-inspired approach to AI should be explored in addition to global compacts.
MIT on the ‘Systems Turn’ in Finance
A talk by MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative Director Jason Jay on the history and evolution of "systems-aware investing," where strategic capital deployment creates outsized environmental impact.
This is a good “systems investing 101”, which is about identifying leverage points where investments can trigger cascading effects. He references ReFed, which transformed a $5M food waste initiative into over $12 billion in industry-wide investment, demonstrating the 100x multiplier effect.
His group partners with TWIST, Transformation Capital, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and others to help investors shift portfolios toward climate solutions. MIT’s En-ROADS simulation tool models 18 policy scenarios, which helps investors visualize how their capital can address impact outcomes such as 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal.
The So What? Good for impact investors looking to get more bang for their buck than by investing in siloed projects.
‘Deep listening’ for impact measurement
Omidyar Network India has developed a new approach to social impact assessment they call "impact-market fit." It uses AI-driven text and voice analysis to conduct "deep listening" with large groups of customers, to gather nuanced insights that traditional metrics miss.
This helped some of their portfolio companies uncover breakthrough ideas, such as an education platform's true impact being in providing lifelong employability rather than just job placement.
The approach also benefits strategy, helping companies sharpen their value propositions and giving investors a dynamic framework rather than static measures.
The So What: Multi-modal ambient AI is going to be used in new ways to surface new insights and data, benefitting both operations and customer-facing services.
Our muslim boy wonder
Michael Moore on the value of immigrants to the US economy and society, highlighting how a notable Syrian immigrant, Steve Jobs, was born 70 years ago this week. The name on the birth certificate that gave him ‘birthright citizenship’: عبدالفتاح جندلي.
The So What? The case for diversity, inclusion, and just being a place where people want to come is not just moral but economic and plain common sense.
Bonus: AI Tool of the Week
Lovable - one of the fastest growing, revenue generating AI tools. Helps you build software in seconds. My tip about this tip - use Claude or ChatGPT to help you craft a really good prompt to use in Lovable, as you pay per prompt.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen