But for the lament of what could have been, what very well could be, never manifests.

Unpopular opinion but affordable housing will do much more for innovation than any CGT carve out ever will.

Already working as intended …

The human brain: 2% body mass, but consumes 20% of its energy. Cortical neurons fire 0.16 times per second. BUT they are capable of firing at 40 or more. A 250-fold gap. If more than a few percent of neurons fired at high rates simultaneously, the brain would literally overheat. So less than 1% fire at any given moment. Frontier AI models have the same two constraints: sparse activation and thermal limits. Mixtral activated 27.6% of its parameters per token. DeepSeek-V2 activated 8.9%. DeepSeek-V3 has 671 billion parameters and activates 37 billion of them. That's 5.5%. NVIDIA hit the same wall. The GB200 generates 120 kilowatts per rack. Air couldn't cool it. They switched to liquid and unlocked 30% more compute. Now, what would happen if we could cool our brains? Neurons that fire faster produce measurably higher IQ scores, but three things stop us: heat dissipation, oxygen delivery, and ion channel reset time. There's already a device that achieved a 3°C brain temperature drop in 30 minutes by running chilled saline through the nasal cavity. So the first human IQ-overclock device might look less like Neuralink and more like a beer helmet with tubes running up your nose.

And what happens when these economic interactions cease to have economic value?

250 years ago today Adam Smith gave the world a fantastic insight. That order, cooperation and prosperity are not ordered from above by priests or chiefs but emerge from the social interactions of ordinary people. It’s the most revolutionary and benign idea ever proposed.

I should have said something. This was THE foundational economic work.

The UK used less coal in 2025 than they did in 1600, when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Source: carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-…

Dystopian AI scenarios are drowning out conversations about how to use the technology to bring about a future of shared prosperity, says @claudia_sahm (via @opinion) bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Economics is not a physical science that you “observe by experiments”. You are observing a dynamic, complex system that is shaped by policies … which are themselves based off of the empirical or theoretical works of economists … don’t “hide” behind the science label.

The biggest issue with economists is that they abstract away the one thing that matters in economics … people.

Amen. The biggest problem with economics is that it tries at every instance to abstract out people. People being the very entity at the centre of all things economics or otherwise.

How economists left humanity out of their model bit.ly/32ULEbX #ausecon #ausbiz #auspol

The biggest mistake of economics has been to abstract out people from all their models. As Pikety showed, over half of all "growth" is due to increase in population.

If labour's share of global income had stayed at its 2004 level, workers would have received an additional US$2.4 trillion in 2024 alone. This isn't the inevitable result of technological change—it's a political choice about who shares in the risks and rewards of collective value creation. Delivering a keynote today at the @ILO Innovation Day (13:15 CET) on why innovation systems must be built on a new social contract between labour, state and market. Watch live ➡️ live.ilo.org/

This is gold 😂

The new Qwen 3.5 by @Alibaba_Qwen running on-device on iPhone 17 Pro. Qwen 3.5 beats models 4 times its size, has strong visual understanding, and can toggle reasoning on or off. The 2B 6-bit model here is running with MLX optimized for Apple Silicon.

The AI we have today is already superintelligent. And it's going to revolutionize science. noahpinion.blog/p/superintel…

Very important point in here. The moats disappear or become smaller. Much easier for others to build niche products and communities. Starting perhaps with social media 🤷‍♂️

Great substack on the death of Spotify (as predicted by Jimmy Iovine). Spotify’s business model has been brutal for “middle-class” bands. Recently there’s been movement for these bands to create “walled gardens” for fans, to build relationships w them again. As AI automates and commoditizes more and more, I think this dynamic will happen all over the economy. substack.com/@joelgouveia/no…

This is a huge opportunity for Europe. Welcome Anthropic with open arms. Roll out the red carpet. Visa for all employees. Europe already controls the AI hardware bottleneck through ASML. Add the world's leading AI safety lab and you have the foundations of an AI superpower.