A library of snippets
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Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Andrea Presbitero of the imf, and André Silva and Carlo Wix of the Federal Reserve find that American credit-card-reward programmes redistribute around $15bn a year from “naive” to “sophisticated” consumers.
From: What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get wrong about credit cards.
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Like most price controls, capping interest rates would distort the market and hurt ordinary punters. Card issuers would probably respond by locking out less reliable borrowers, not by offering cheaper rates. Worse still, Messrs Trump and Sanders are looking past genuine problems with American credit cards. That may be because the problems stem from something stupendously popular: ultra-generous rewards.
From: What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders get wrong about credit cards.
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Schmidt’s comments come after the tragic suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who had been engaging in a kind of relationship with an AI chatbot that demanded he remain faithful to it and not “entertain the romantic or sexual interests of other women”.
His mother is now suing the company behind it, alleging it went to great lengths to engineer a harmful dependency on its product, emotionally abused Setzer, and failed to notify anyone when he expressed suicidal thoughts.
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Speaking on a podcast hosted by Scott Galloway this week, Schmidt said he feared AI could soon be capable of providing the emotionally ideal girlfriend to despondent young males struggling to attract a mate.
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Fraud’s impact goes beyond the payments sector – 41% of victims report a loss of trust in social media companies, four times as many as those who lost trust in traditional banks.
From: PSR says APP reimbursement rules are promoting vigilance, not complacency.
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between 2015 and 2023. In the period, US retail sales increased from $4.7trn to $7.2trn3, the credit card interchange paid by retailers trebled4 and the proportion of credit card interchange in retail sales almost doubled from 0.46% to 0.87%.
From: The Only Way is Down – by Jeremy Light – Agenda: Payments.
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“Identity is the new Money”. Brilliant – I wish I’d said that
From: “Identity is the new Money”. Brilliant – I wish I’d said that – Consult Hyperion.
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A startup that plans to develop an operating system for AIs (“Android for Agents”) raised $56 million in seed funding. The company, known as “/dev/agents”, is led by David Singleton, formerly the chief technology officer of Stripe Inc, who says that “Just as Android made mobile development accessible to virtually any developer, we’re building the platform that will help make AI agents mainstream”.
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In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses.
From: The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI. | MIT Technology Review.
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The Microsoft-owned social media site for business professionals has embraced AI, even offering LinkedIn Premium subscribers access to its own in-house AI writing tools that can “rewrite” posts, profiles, and direct messages. The initiative appears to be working: Over 54 percent of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are likely AI-generated, according to a new analysis shared exclusively with WIRED by the AI detection startup Originality AI. It’s just that the corporate-speak style of AI writing on the platform can be tricky to distinguish from genuine human-penned Thought Leader Blogging.
From: Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated | WIRED.
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So what happens when LinkedIn is one set of AIs posting inoffensive rubbish about management to another set of AIs that wantt o read inoffensive rubbish about management and comment on it? Should we just leave them to get on with it while we go off and do something more useful, more creative and more rewarding? Well, that might be an interesting experiment. Judging by what happended when researcher let loose a whole bunch of AI characters in Minecraft, LinkedIn could get very, very weird
The Minecraft experiment was played out using up to 1,000 software agents at time using generative AI for communications. The agents developed a remarkable range of personality traits and preferences. What’s more, they evolved into specialist roles with no further inputs from their human creators, demonstrating the invisible hand working across the invisible land.
My favourtie part of this story, and this why I am telling it at this time of the year, is that the the researchers seeded a small group of agents to try to spread a particular religion, Pastafarianism (the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster), aacross the in-game world. They watched with interest as the Pastafarian pastors converted their agent colleagues who then became converts who went on to spread Pastafarianism (the word of ) to nearby towns in the game world.
This, naturally, led me to wonder what would happen if crazy bots began to have visions on LinkedIn and then go on to found rival religions based on the world that they oberve, just as our ancestors did when faced with tides and clouds, earthquakes and fire. What cults would emerge?
Snippings