Four For Friday | November 15, 2024
LF148 | Creating healthy places, LLMs for systemic investing, acceptance of robot caregivers, engineers need to study philosophy + paying AI agents
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!
Creating Healthy Places is not rocket science
This sensible discussion would not be out of place in a northern European café, so it’s good to see it being about the US. It suggests healthy places are about: moving safely, being outside comfortably, and being together. It supports this with some choice stats:
11 minutes a day of brisk walking lowers heart disease and cancer risk.
Cyclists who commute have 47% lower risk of early death.
People who spend just 15 mins outdoors sleep better, have lower blood pressure, and reduced disease risk.
People with strong social ties have 50% higher survival rates.
People with sidewalks are 47% more likely to be active at least 39 minutes a day.
Walking and other place-based health reduced childhood obesity in a California town 68% between 2007–2019.
Areas with trees lower temperatures between 5–8 degrees Fahrenheit, and reduce air pollution by up to 24%.
In a Kentucky experiment, people living in the newly tree lined neighborhoods saw on average a 17% drop in an inflammatory marker in their blood, corresponding to a 10% drop in heart related illnesses.
The So What: As the article states, rather than city planners optimizing speed of (car-based transport), they should be prioritizing building welcoming streets, enabling opportunities to be outdoors, and creating community.
LLMs for systems investing
A new research collaborative has just kicked off between systems investing platform TransCap and Brazil-based technology group Mutuà, to explore the use of LLMs in systems investing. Mutuà is developing systems and software to deliver systems investing at scale (their model below) and this will be applied first to a collaboration around food systems transformation in Brazil.
The So What? Applying tech and AI to improve the efficiency of the rather laborious job of analyzing systemic trends and drivers is likely to help the practice go mainstream.
Acceptance of robot caregivers
As the caregiver crisis continues to tighten, it’s not If but When and How robots will be deployed to support cargiving. This new research into attitudes among European caregivers, explores the acceptance of robots:
Older people are keen on certain technologies, such as location tracking in cases where these technologies support their autonomy
Welcoming attitudes to technology might reflect a lack of other options, rather than a genuine preference
Individuals are not keen to introduce robots as part of their older/infirm care support, at least when the available support is generous, and they have ample access to human care
The willingness to adopt technologies to receive help when elderly or infirm is positively associated with higher rates of women's labour force participation in a given country
The So What? As bots and robots become more capable, more personalized and cheaper, the limit to scale will be social, not technical or economic. More ethnography needed!
Why engineers should study philosophy
The Chief Information Officer of Goldman Sachs knows a thing or two about combining business and technology, so when he gives career advice, it’s probably worth paying attention. This piece in the Harvard Business Review notes that code created by an AI “can be syntactically and semantically correct but not functionally correct”; in other words, it works well, but doesn’t do what you want. This comes down to an increasingly valuable skill at a time when it’s trivial to get answers - asking better questions.
"Having a crisp mental model around a problem, being able to break it down into steps that are tractable, perfect first-principle thinking, sometimes being prepared (and able to) debate a stubborn AI — these are the skills that will make a great engineer in the future, and likely the same consideration applies to many job categories."
The So What? It’s clear that some of lions of technology who have been unleashing their AI models on the world were either unaware (hopefully) or just wilfully blind (cynically) that unleashing AI on the world without guardrails is dangerous. Philosophy is as close as we can get to first order guardrails.
Bonus - AI Insight of the Week
As AI starts to create teams of agents able to collaborate and get tasks done, Ross Dawson points to the next frontier, payments. We’re going to be seeing people paying agents to be part of their teams, and even AI agents paying humans. Things are going to get weird. And wonderful.
That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.
- Stephen