Tuesday 7th January 2025

The Strange Triumph of a Broken America - Foreign Affairs (No paywall)

By all appearances, the United States is a mess. Two-thirds of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, and nearly 70 percent rate the economy as “not good” or “poor.” Public trust in government has fallen by half, from 40 percent in 2000 to just 20 percent today. Love of country is fading, too, with only 38 percent of Americans now saying patriotism is “very important” to them, down from 70 percent in 2000. Congressional polarization has reached its highest point since Reconstruction, and threats of violence against politicians have surged. Former U.S. President Donald Trump faced two assassination attempts en route to reclaiming the White House, winning the popular vote even though many Americans believe he’s a fascist. Some scholars draw parallels between the United States and Weimar Germany. Others liken the United States to the Soviet Union in its final years—a brittle gerontocracy rotting from within. Still others argue that the country is on the brink of civil war.

Yet such undeniable American dysfunction has had remarkably little effect on American power, which remains resilient and, in some respects, has even grown. The country’s share of global wealth is about as large as it was in the 1990s, and its grip on global arteries—energy, finance, markets, and technology—has strengthened. Internationally, the United States is gaining allies, whereas its main adversaries, China and Russia, are increasingly embattled. Inflation, massive debt, and sluggish productivity remain serious concerns, but they pale in comparison to the economic and demographic headwinds facing other great powers.

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Why Biden’s Foreign Policy Fell Short - Foreign Policy (No paywall)

At its inception, the Biden administration proudly declared that “America is back.” The 2022 National Security Strategy announced that by “leveraging our national strengths and rallying a broad coalition of allies and partners, we will advance our vision of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world, outmaneuvering our competitors, and making meaningful progress on issues like climate change, global health, and food security to improve the lives not just of Americans but of people around the world.”

The central elements of that aspiration were a “foreign policy for the middle class” (meaning, industrial policy, restricted trade, and expansive government spending), weighting diplomacy over military force, and deepening and expanding alliances. The policy explicitly connected democracy at home and abroad. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that the administration was able to successfully enact “a strategy of renewal, pairing historic investments in competitiveness at home with an intensive diplomatic campaign to revitalize partnerships abroad.”

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Why 2025 will take us closer to the "Turing horizon"

A decade ago, years before GPT and LLM became household acronyms, agentic AI pioneer Chetan Dube led the creation of the conversational AI platform Amelia. Back then, Amelia’s closest competition was IBM’s Watson. Following the 2024 acquisition of Amelia by SoundHound AI, Dube made his mission the delivery of “the most human AI the enterprise world has ever known,” as founder and CEO of Quant.

Driven by his foundational interest in the work of Alan Turing at college in Delhi, Dube has kept his eyes fixed on the “Turing horizon” where “machines become indistinguishable from humans.” Noting his exceptional track record for working ahead of the game in enterprise AI, Big Think sought out a chat with Dube to explore the present and near-future of agentic AI, sound out the issues bedeviling AI’s jagged frontier, and figure out some of the ways our AI future can be both safe and extremely profitable.

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Why "Living Intelligence" Is the Next Big Thing

AI is merely one facet of a sweeping technological change underway, and companies that fail to recognize the importance of other converging technologies risk being left behind. Two other technologies — advanced sensors and biotechnology — are less visible, though no less important, and have been quietly advancing. Soon, the convergence of these three technologies is going to underpin a new reality that will shape the future decisions of every leader across industries. This is the new reality of “living intelligence”: systems that can sense, learn, adapt, and evolve, made possible through artificial intelligence, advanced sensors and biotechnology. Living intelligence will drive an exponential cycle of innovation, disrupting industries, and creating entirely new markets. Leaders who focus solely on AI without understanding its intersections with these two other technologies risk missing a wave of disruption already forming.

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How to Make Everyone Great at Data

While most leaders understand the importance of good data to their operations, too many fail to recognize the critical role that people play in creating it — and even make it harder for people to do the right things when it comes to data. Yet it doesn’t take much — a little training, an opportunity to speak up, better KPIs — to get far better results. Leaders should support pride in workmanship, seize opportunities, and take point on leading culture change.

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Why You're Chronically Overcommitted

If you often feel overwhelmed by your workload, and feel you’ve got more on your plate than you can manage, it could be because you’re overcommitting. A few reasons why we overcommit include our desire for validation, fear of rejection or failure, and constantly comparing ourselves to others. Research shows that overcommitment increases stress levels, which can lead to emotional distress, such as feeling overwhelmed and anxious, and exacerbates physical health concerns such as sleep issues. Overcommitment can also lead to “siege” mentality — where you feel like you are always under pressure or attack, leading to increased disagreements with others and dissatisfaction at work. But there are strategies you can use to break out of this cycle, including micro-mastery and a decision delay buffer.

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HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me

Are you a coder? Please take our new survey (it's short and fun) about how you use AI at work.

HTML is deceptive. It looks easy. And easy HTML is easy. With a few tags you can write your name on a webpage, make it bigger or smaller, add “is awesome” in bold or italics, and even—for those of us who came of age in better times—make it blink or scroll across the screen.


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The 10 Coolest Things We’ve Seen So Far at CES 2025

The spectacle of CES doesn’t reach full steam until tomorrow, but we’ve already gotten a preview of some of the most exciting tech debuting this week. The expo officially opens to the public on Tuesday, but at a media event on Sunday night, the tech press who have gathered here in Las Vegas to cover CES got to peek at some of the gadgets launching at the show. Here’s a selection of some of the coolest things we’ve seen so far.

We’re still figuring out what our face computing future will look like, but here's an intriguing new entry. These Loomos smart glasses offer an impressive collection of features, including a 16-megapixel camera for recording up to 4K video, 32 gigabytes of storage, open-ear speakers, and easy adaptability for your fit and lens choice. Smarts are handled by ChatGPT-4o, and while the glasses connect to the web over Wi-Fi or your phone via Bluetooth, the company says its smart assistant processes some requests locally and even learns as it goes, offering options like summarizing a lecture or slide by simply asking with the “Hey Loomos” command. The glasses are expected to be available in the first quarter of the year for around $200. —Ryan Waniata


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The Memecoin Shenanigans Are Just Getting Started

In spring 2024, rapper Iggy Azalea was casting about for a concept that she could try to transmute into a hit crypto coin. It had to be memeable—that is, easily remixed and riffed upon—and it had to be attention-grabbing.

On May 29, Azalea launched the Mother Iggy (MOTHER) coin. For its emblem, she selected a picture of her derriere. Within two weeks, the coin had reached a total value of $240 million. (At the time of writing, MOTHER is worth around $50 million.)


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Vasco Translator E1: Real-Time Translating Earbuds

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When devices like the Waverly Labs Ambassador Interpreter and Pocketalk Plus Voice Translator hit the scene, the world took some of its biggest steps to date toward universal translation technology, all thanks to gadgets that could listen to two people talking and translate the audio in real time, both ways.


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