Welcome to the Week: Evening Edition! Something I learned this week, Midjourney AI has a real talent for producing absolutely cursed images. Asking it to create a “pizza delivery robot” was a fascinating journey from start to finish. If you want to see what I finally accepted, feel free to check out this post on Substack (I say in a shameless redirection).
In the news, the Microsoft-Activision saga continues as they try to win over the UK. The White House says they have reached a deal with some major tech companies concerning guardrails around AI. The rolling snowball that is schools deciding to sue social media companies keeps on growing. Twitter rebrands and the bird has (partially) flown away. Finally, are we hitting the limit on Moore’s law? If so, what role will AI play in continued progress? Only time will tell for sure.
Public Comments
Articles and Briefs
Brief of the Cato Institute and Committee for Justice as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners
The National Economic Council Gets It Wrong on the Roles of Big and Small Firms in U.S. Innovation | ITIF, Robert Atkinson
FTC and DOJ Publish New Merger (Mis)guidelines | AAF, Fred Ashton
An Unsafe Bill: How The Online Safety Bill Threatens Free Speech, Innovation and Privacy | IEA, Matthew Lesh and Victoria Hewson
In the News
Antitrust and the Market
Delivery Apps Just Did The Impossible | Adam Chandler
Biden Administration Unveils Tougher Guidelines on Mergers | Cecilia Kang and David McCabe
Microsoft and Activision Blizzard Extend $75 Billion Merger Deadline | Sarah E. Needleman
Artificial Intelligence
Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I. | Sheera Frenkel and Stuart A. Thompson
U.N. Officials Urge Regulation of AI at Security Council Meeting | Farnaz Fassihi
Your Employer Is (Probably) Unprepared for Artificial Intelligence | The Economist
How Judges, Not Politicians, Could Dictate America's AI Rules | Melissa Heikkilä
OpenAI Worries About What Its Chatbot Will Say About People's Faces | Kashmir Hill
Microsoft Shows AI Won’t Be A Loss Leader | Dan Gallagher
What Are The Chances of An AI Apocalypse? | The Economist
White House Says Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft Agree to AI Safeguards | Sabrina Siddiqui and Deepa Seetharaman
Children’s Safety Online
Schools Sue Social-Media Platforms Over Alleged Harms to Students | Sara Randazzo and Ryan Tracy
Twitter
Elon Musk Replaces Twitter’s Blue Bird With an ‘X’ | Alexa Corse, Collin Eaton, and Newley Purnell
Semiconductor Industry
ASML: Backlog Will Help Chip Kit Kingpin Weather East-West Fight | Financial Times
China’s Semiconductor Ambitions Fuel European Brain Drain | Jordan Robertson
In Race for AI Chips, Google DeepMind Uses AI to Design Specialized Semiconductors | Belle Lin
Critical Minerals
Deep-Sea Mining May Soon Ease The World’s Battery-Metal Shortage | The Economist
Research
Regulating Transformative Technologies | Daron Acemoglu and Todd Lensman
Transformative technologies like generative artificial intelligence promise to accelerate productivity growth across many sectors, but they also present new risks from potential misuse. We develop a multi-sector technology adoption model to study the optimal regulation of transformative technologies when society can learn about these risks over time. Socially optimal adoption is gradual and convex. If social damages are proportional to the productivity gains from the new technology, a higher growth rate leads to slower optimal adoption. Equilibrium adoption is inefficient when firms do not internalize all social damages, and sector-independent regulation is helpful but generally not sufficient to restore optimality.
Moonshot: Public R&D and Growth | Shawn Kantor and Alexander T. Whalley
We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D conducted by NASA contractors increased manufacturing value added, employment, and capital accumulation in space related sectors. While migration responses were important, they were not sufficient to generate a wedge between local and national effects. The iconic Moonshot R&D program had meaningful economic effects for both the local and national space related sectors. Yet the magnitudes of the estimated effects seem to align with those of other non-R&D types of government expenditures.
Values-Alignment Messaging Boosts Adolescents' Motivation to Control Social Media Use | Brian M. Galla and Sophia Choukas-Bradley
Two preregistered experiments with 2,733 U.S. high school students (age range = 13–19 years) compared the impact of different messages on adolescents’ motivation to control social media use (SMU). A traditional message emphasized the benefits of avoiding SMU, whereas a values-alignment message framed controlling SMU as being consistent with autonomy and social justice. Compared to no message or a traditional message, in both studies, a values-alignment message led to greater motivation to control SMU immediately afterward, and in Study 2, awareness of “addictive” social media designs 3 months later. As hypothesized, values-alignment messaging was more motivating for girls than boys. Results offer preliminary support for leveraging adolescents’ drives for autonomy and social justice to motivate self-regulation of SMU.