I suppose it was inevitable. If you wait long enough, almost anything you can imagine will be invented. years ago, when we had our first problems with olive flies, I imagined a robot that could take the thousands of flies out one by one with lasers. Blame it on a Star Wars early adulthood. But now, a Chinese company has invented exactly that. Their first use case is mosquitos, but I predict the olive growers of the world will grab on fast. Olive flies are a scourge destroying olive groves in CA and all over the Mediterranean. I’d buy this system right now.

I’m sure it’s not the first, but here’s the first story I’ve read of an AI chatbot killing a human. Really sad story. We should probably build rules/weights into all LLMs that notify MDs when a human asks them for assistance/advice with any neurological problem. The logic – having a brain problem means you may not make good decisions, by definition. The machine should quickly get itself out of the advice loop for situations like this.

Switching subjects, next week (Nov 7) I get to attend the Keeneland fall sale and see how the horses from our syndicate do at auction. I’ve attended once before, and it’s a beautiful event. Here’s to hoping that one of our broodmares or yearlings gets bid up, way up! I’m anxious to learn how our first investment in a horse syndicate pans out.

I’ve been thinking about the future of writing, with immensely capable LLMs now capable of writing almost anything – fiction, screenplays, political analysis, scientific articles – quite capably. So what will be the human author’s role? Martin Fowler has been thinking about the same thing.

Assuming we can find a way to prove that a document was written solely by a human, I think there will be a market for such work. Just like there’s a market for handcrafted leathers and metal items, for art pottery and paintings, I think people will pay a premium for a story that they know is human-built. Much of literature will be dominated by AI, but not all. While that’s not great news for aspiring authors, it’s…something. The way bespoke human-written novels are marketed may have to change.

Or I could be wrong. There could be a huge backlash to anything written by AI, in which the market just won’t pay anything for text without human provenance. In this case becoming a writer could be a great career choice. As physicist Neils Bohr famously said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!”

The Binance $6.5 billion crypto hack makes me thankful once again that I haven’t gotten pulled into the crypto bubble. My advice to friends has always been “it’s a complex Ponzi scheme”. I know it’s more complicated than that, but bottom line it’s incredibly unpredictable. Not what I want in an investment.