Four For Friday | Sept 20, 2024

LF140 | Social determinants of health as public goods, Super-powered networking, MAGA & South Africa, Seth Godin's vision for AI + Notebook LM

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!

Social determinants of health as public goods

A fascinating reframe [note: typo in the email version of this newsletter] of how and why we should treat enablers of population health as public goods.

First, some context. Public goods are, as any economic undergrad will tell you, non-excludable and non-rivalrous, and as a result, will be over-consumed and under-supplied. This generally leads to the concept of the ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the need for governments to get involved to correct inevitable market failures.

Nobel-prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom conclusively debunked the idea of that tragedy, showing how common rules, collaboration and sanctions can ensure that a village green can avoid being overeaten by hungry sheep.

Back to the paper - it asks whether the social infrastructure that’s key to public health - the ‘social determinants of health’ are public goods (yes), and if so, whether there could be innovative ways to deliver them. Rather than suggesting government handouts, it suggests a type of auction model. In this model, local stakeholders in a certain place are brought together by a trusted intermediary, who gathers the willingness to pay for a public good (such as an improved park or better transport system). A service provider is then brought in to deliver the public good, and is paid by the community, who still get more value than they pay for.

The researchers (who I’ve been in touch with ) have shown this model is effective in a number of subsquent experiments, so this type of collaborative social investment model could be a way to deliver improved health and social care outcomes.

The So What? We need to test and scale concrete new ways for funding prevention and missing parts of local health infrastructure.

Super-powered new networking tools

How does business networking change in the world of AI? This piece by futurist Catherine Ball looks at a number of ways in which it’s evolving in the age of AI, including:

• Connect the Dots - AI powered analysis and recommendations building a ‘supergraph’ that fuses your email and LinkedIn network

• Gather - Zoom-meets-SecondLife - connects video calling with a 2D virtual world

• Crystal Knows - proactive personality assessments from your network to e.g. improve sales efficiency by predicting the other person’s personality

The So What? AI’s capabilities in helping us make better and deeper connections are only just starting.

The strange connection between MAGA and South Africa

A fascinating piece by the FT (sub reqd) into how a number of the backer / influencers of Trumpism - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks - are all 50-something white males who grew up in South Africa under apartheid.

It suggests a certain set of traits - comfortable with extreme inequalities, a sense of natural hierachies, racism and a contempt for government - are shared by both contexts.

The So What? It’s worth understanding more about the background and personal narratives driving people (refer to the networking superpower tools above).

A kinder, more connected AI future

Seth Godin’s blog has some nuggets for what a positive AI future could look like - a kindler, gentler, more connected world. He draws inspiration from Web1.0 – which was initially all about decentralized connection (anyone remember The Well?)

A company seeking RFPs invites all its suppliers to submit confidential overviews of their supply chain. An AI reads the material and creates Pareto optimal connections, building a confederation of several suppliers who can work together to build something faster and more efficiently than any could do alone.

Your fridge knows you love organic strawberries, and organizes 100 neighbors to buy a farmer’s entire crop, reducing waste and risk and cutting costs for everyone.

So What? Let’s get creative about what better world we want, and get tech to help us design it.

Bonus - AI Tool of the Week

Google’s new Notebook LM (created with famous author (and not-me) Steven Johnson) is creating quite a buzz. You build Notebooks on specific topics with your own training material (documents, links etc) and it acts as a personal LLM; a way to summarise the solid and synthesise resources from multiple sources, and let you chat with it, citing precisely where its responses come from.

They also have an Audio Overview (i.e. podcast) - which creates a very realistic sounding conversation between two AI voices about that content. Here’s the podcast trained on the last 10 LF newsletters, though it ends up just focusing on LF138. If you’d like access to the Notebook, just send me your email and I’ll add you in.

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That’s all for this week. As always, feedback welcome. Feel free to share insights or links of interest.

- Stephen