Five Things: AI & Climate Change, Parrots, Reaction Economy, Respect, Events
Somehow this edition of Five Things has lots of interesting stuff for you to read.
I like it when you can kind of sense that spring is around the corner. While the mornings are still crisp, the sun rises at 7 am here in Northern Germany and it surely feels you get more out of your days than in the rainy dark days of what we nowadays call winter. It also makes it a bit easier to get the kids to school…
As we all know, climate change can only be stopped if we all act fast and do as much as possible to cut the CO2 emissions. Still the German Minister of Digital and Transport thinks that we need to stick with the combustion engine and e-fuels, which leads to Germany stalling an EU-wide ban on the combustion engine by 2035. As e-fuels are totally inefficient, we can be sure that EV will succeed - and yet the Liberal Democrat Volker Wissing thinks it is wise to appeal to his constituency of better off people who probably want the combustion engine in their shiny little sports cars. The CO2 footprint of the rich will stay insanely high for now and we can blame the German FDP for that.
Quick suggestion: check out the Weekly Wrap - a fine newsletter with great stuff to read every week! It’s right next door here on Substack.
Can Artificial Intelligence Help Cool the Planet?
There are many ways AI can help, there are some pitfalls to it and nope, it won’t just happen automagically because we put an AI on it, we humans still have to do our part as well. (The Nation)
You Are Not a Parrot
I have invested in more than a handful of AI companies in the last few years and it was always interesting so see how people would react to the specific offering of the startup. A lot of people found the stuff spooky, even before the phrase Generative AI came up. It’s really interesting how linguists look at how language and our understanding of it is evolving right now. (New York Magazine)
The Reaction Economy
This is a really fun read, and also very long. It gets to the core of what we do on Social Media and how we get hooked on it and how this perfectly fits into the capitalist economy of the 21st century. I read those texts when I studied political science and that was a long time ago and all the digital stuff really just got started… (London Review of Books)
What Keir Starmer has learnt from the return of the German Social Democrats
It’s all about Respect. (New Statesman)
When Everything Becomes an Event
There’s an abundance of events right now, both virtual ones and real ones. We have to do a lot of catching up and I think that we kind of unlearned what events really are about. Looks like I’m not the only one. (Slate)
That’s it. Until next week!
Nico