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Allison Tielking's avatar

haha hiiii Sophia we met a few times in college!! your newsletter came up in my feed, the program in Berlin and the co-living village in Portugal sound fascinating. do you think you'll write more about your experience there? i'm starting to learn a lot more about regenerative economics and degrowth, so i'm excited to read more from you! :)

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sophia dew's avatar

allison! thank you so much for the response and for engaging with my post :)

the berlin residency and portugal were incredible experiences. if you are interested in learning more about them, i'd be more than happy to write about it in a future post <3

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Allison Tielking's avatar

yes please!!! add it to your stack of future posts, it would be so cool to read

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Joe Dew's avatar

Thank you, Sophia, for taking the time to write. Your writing improves with each piece you publish. Your style here is so readable, engaging, and most importantly, authentic. I know this wasn't written by ChatGPT (although you may have used that service to polish off your prose).

And it's so important that you capture these moments in time. As an old geezer, I can tell you that you will forget. When you look back at this piece ten years from now, you'll be so grateful for having documented what you were feeling at the time. Please keep it up and I look forward to your next installment.

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sophia dew's avatar

thanks dad :)

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Joe Dew's avatar

Wanted to share my morning shower thought of the day. Out here in Silicon Valley, what I'm observing is large tech companies laying off thousands of workers, many of whom are software engineers. Yet these companies are also reporting record revenue and earnings. My hypothesis is that we're starting to see the real-world impact of AI where the economics of using such technology is so compelling, compared to the cost of a human coder. If you believe in this take, one outcome of this trend is the further concentration of wealth to a smaller and smaller group of entities.

The first instinct is declare such an outcome as a bad thing. But another way to think of it is as an opportunity to fund public goods. Said another way, technology (via AI and other means) is creating social value in relieving some from the drudgery of writing lines of code. (Which, by the way, I believe our grandchildren will look back and say "that's how software was done back then?") Some of this excess value can then be applied to public goods, which by definition have no business model or other self-sustaining mechanism to be economically viable. In other words, there's only so many yachts and private jets one can own. That excess wealth needs to make its way down to fund things everyone wants. Make sense or is this view too Pollyannaish?

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