ZD 24.27: Software Delivered Therapy
ZD 24.27: Software Delivered Therapy
Is no relationship too sacred for software?
In this issue: Helping congress know more, soviet sabotage, uncompetitive Europe, ageing in bursts, software delivered therapy.
The Distilled Spirit
🏛 Helping Congress Know More ()
The Congressional Research Service and Congressional Budget Office are important cogs in the legislative machinery — they are there to feed lawmakers the unbiased information they need to hopefully make good laws. A few recently passed bills will allow the services to be much more effective. Gabe does a wonderful job of capturing the sense of DC in his newsletters, it is a worthwhile subscription if you are interested in following politics. His convention coverage was refreshing.
🟥 Effective Soviet Sabotage Doctrine (War on the Rocks)
In case you missed it, Putin is not happy about the west allowing Ukraine to actually use the weapons they have been given to full effect. The soviets were fond of using sabotage during the cold war, and the Russians have kept the capabilities sharp. We have already seen some operations in France where Marcon has been especially vocal about supporting Ukraine. Do not be too surprised if we see more sabotage as the war escalates.
🎩Uncompetitive Europe [Part 1] [Part 2] ()
The European Commission asked Mario Draghi to report on competitiveness. The results are not pretty for Europe. It is clear that the Eurozone has not recovered from the banking crisis, productivity compared to the US is declining again and investment is lagging and they are falling behind both America and China. The leading R&D spenders in Europe are car companies not hyperscalers. They need to rethink some policies around innovation-led growth to avoid losing more ground to the competition.
🙋♂️Aging at 44 and 60 (Stanford)
As someone in my mid-40s this explains how I suddenly felt older recently. A Stanford study found that there are two significant periods of molecular dysregulation around 44 and 60 that are effectively the rapid aging you might feel at those ages.
🤖State of AI Fall 2024 ()
AI news has been coming fast. So fast that it is hard to understand what is signal and what is noise. One needs to pull above the stream to see the direction of the flow. Conveniently, Ethan Mollick pulls back to to paint the big picture around LLMs and AI scaling going forward. Read it for a sense of where we are and where we are going next.
Software-Delivered Therapy
Current generation AI chatbots can at least mimic the conversation you would have with a therapist. With the latest updates in ChatGPT this session could even be a voice conversation not just a typed chat. How good are the chatbots at therapy? On
, Chris Cocuzzo explored just this question. It definitely works on some levels, even if you know it is not human. The economics and 24/7 availability of software beat the human solution by miles. Software continues to eat the world.The Look
shares a very important point: high-income and low-energy countries do not exist.
Did you enjoy reading this post? Hit the ♥ button above or below because it helps more people discover great Substacks like this one and it helps train your algorithm to get you more posts you like. Please share here or in your networks to help us grow!