Agents Are Taking the Wheel
While Europe’s workers quietly outperform their American counterparts, a generation of laptop-schooled kids arrives cognitively underpowered – and entry-level coders start to disappear
Dear Friend,
I have been thinking (and talking – shoutout to Martin Alderson here) about the tip of the spear in AI – namely the sudden and dramatic rise of multi-agent systems (from Gas Town to OpenClaw to Anthropic’s Code Teams). It really feels like we are crossing a threshold – and that things are about to change. If you haven’t played with this stuff, I definitely recommend trying it out. Start gentle with something like Claude’s Cowork mode – moving from a chat interface to something more akin to an actual coworker is pretty transformative. As you are experiencing this, I highly encourage you to not just ask “what is this today?”, but envision what it could be in the future.
P.S. Our friend Mike Housman is about to publish his new playbook on how to use AI – check it out, it launches on Monday: Future Proof: Transform your Business with AI (or Get Left Behind)
And now, this…
Headlines from the Future
Lidar Has Become Cheap as Chips. I remember, back in my days at Singularity University, we talked about how Lidar (the laser-based technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and measuring the reflected light – and hence became instrumental in allowing a robot, e.g. a self-driving car, to “see” its surroundings) would become cheap and ubiquitous. It took a while, but now we are (finally) there – Lidar units are now available for less than $200.
When cost stops being the dominant objection, automakers will have to decide whether leaving lidar out is a technical judgment or a strategic one.
True. And a nice jab at our friend Elon, who famously rejected Lidar in favor of (much cheaper) cameras.
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AI in Europe: Not as Bad as You Might Think. A recent study by CEPR (an independent, non-partisan pan-European think tank) found that among the 12,000 surveyed companies, AI adoption led to a labor productivity increase of 4% on average, with no reported short-term negative impact on employment. Studies on this subject across the world are all over the place – with many having a hard time finding any measurable impact of AI on productivity, and some claiming rather drastic negative impacts on employment. As most of these studies are conducted in the US, it is nice to see a study from a different part of the world.
The productivity dividends from AI depend not merely on acquiring the technology but on firms’ capacity to integrate it through investments in intangible assets and human capital. […] An additional percentage point spent on training amplifies AI’s productivity gains by 5.9 percentage points.
(here is a US-centric counterpoint: “AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says”)
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The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived. Paul Ford’s opinion piece in the New York Times summarizes the current state of affairs when it comes to AI nicely.
It was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I’ve been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer. […] November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible.
It really feels to me like the shifting sands of AI are starting to solidify.
Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.
What We Are Reading
Why AI Adoption Stalls, According to Industry Data Most companies think their AI problem is about execution – it’s not. The real story, unsurprisingly, is far more about humans! @Jane
Experts vs. Imitators Telling the difference between an expert and an imitator can save time and money, among other things – and knowing how to identify one from the other makes all the difference. @Mafe
Buying Futures, Renting the Past: How Speculation and Nostalgia Became the Economy While the economy and culture pull hard toward betting on the future and strip-mining the past, we’re stuck in an increasingly dislocated, muddled present – the messy middle where, as it happens, all the real work has to be done. @Jeffrey
The Case for Making Bold Bets in Uncertain Times When the World Uncertainty Index is higher than ever, playing it safe isn’t a strategy – it’s a slow decline. The companies that win in volatility aren’t reckless; they’re radically clear about the bets that matter and bold enough to place them. @Kacee
Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like Drawing parallels from the odd world of Japanese pop culture to our global world of capitalism makes for a fascinating (and sobering) read. @Pascal
Down the Rabbit Hole
😯 Here’s a strange little trick for using the latest models inside of your LLM of choice: Repeat the ask(in the same prompt) and you will get better results. Yes, LLMs are weird.
👷🏼 AI tools (particularly Anthropic’s Claude) are pushing deeper and deeper into the world of office task automation – which feels like a good move on their part: Anthropic updates Claude Cowork tool built to give the average office worker a productivity boost.
📅 The complete history of LLMs visualized in a single, neat timeline. tl;dr: We have come a long, long way.
🤖 Ever wondered why so many robots look so darn cute? It’s, of course, not an accident. “Tech companies are making their robots cute to try to win over humans”
✍🏼 There might be a point: If chatbots can replace writers, it’s because we made writing replaceable - A good deal of what gets published already reads like a photocopy of a photocopy
💻 The old walls are (finally) crumbling: IBM stock dives after Anthropic points out AI can rewrite COBOL fast (and in all fairness, Big Blue is saying this for quite a while now).
👨🏼💻 The job losses on entry-level coding jobs are real, and people start to notice: Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs.
🧑🏼🏫 Talking about education: The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents
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