Riskgaming

Technology’s prime and still growing role in society has led to a crescendo of criticism that it has exacerbated inequality. Critics say that the economic models and algorithms underpinning out apps and platforms are tearing apart our social fabric, fracturing the economy, casualizing labor, and increasing hostility between nations. But for all the negativity around technology, there is a parallel positive story of how technology can empower people to achieve their best lives. Whether it’s dynamically adjusting insulin pumps that allow diabetics greater freedom to pursue their dreams, or reliable algorithms that can reduce human bias in everything from hiring to dating, technology has also added tremendous value to society. That’s the theme of “The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future,” a new book by Orly Lobel, the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of San Diego. Lobel joins host Danny Crichton to talk about how her daughter became bionic, why alarmist titles of recent critical tech books belie the comparative advantage of algorithms, the actual black box of human minds, feedback loops in doctor’s offices and the medical professions, and finally … sex robots. Because they have feelings (and algorithms) too.

No technology has as many dual-use challenges as artificial intelligence. The same AI models that invent vivacious illustrations and visual effects for movies are the exact models that can generate democracy-killing algorithmic propaganda. Code may well be code, but more and more AI leaders are considering how to balance the desire for openness with the need for responsible innovation. One of those leading companies is Hugging Face (a Lux portfolio company), and part of the weight of AI’s safe future lies there with Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis, a Spanish lawyer and PhD researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Munich). Ferrandis is co-lead of the Legal & Ethical Working Group at BigScience and the AI counsel for Hugging Face. He’s been working on Open & Responsible AI licenses (“OpenRAIL”) that fuse the freedom of traditional open-source licenses with the responsible usage that AI leaders wish to see emerge from the community. In today’s episode, Ferrandis joins host Danny Crichton to talk about why code and models require different types of licenses, balancing openness with responsibility, how to keep the community adaptive even as AI models are added to more applications, how these new AI licenses are enforced, and what happens when AI models get ever cheaper to train.

Semiconductors are ubiquitous in modern life, powering our appliances, smartphones, cars and electronics. That’s led to soaring demand from consumers, companies and governments much to the chip industry’s benefit, but its centrality to the global economy has also brought heightened scrutiny from analysts concerned by the deep dependency we have on a handful of companies around the world producing these products. The semiconductor industry is now on the front pages of news sites almost daily, but its story and history show that this isn’t a new development, but rather a continuation of decades of globalization and competitions for international economic supremacy. “Securities” host Danny Crichton is joined by Fletcher School professor Chris Miller, whose new book “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” offers a panoramic global view on one of the world’s most important industries. The book has already been shortlisted for best business book of the year by The Financial Times.

We live in a time of tremendous focus on … focus and productivity. Scan the shelves of any self-help section in a bookstore and you’ll find copious volumes on how to focus better, deeper, and longer along with a litany of productivity hacks and habits to efficiently glean. What you will often struggle to find however are books advocating doing nothing. But when it comes to creativity and making deep connections, it’s precisely when we are wandering that we are most focused on invention. To talk more about cognitive science and psychology, I, Danny Crichton, brought local New York City professor Anna-Lisa Cohen on “Securities” to talk about her research into mind wandering and how we balance present actions with future intentions. Her work became a viral hit during the pandemic after a Washington Post op-ed she penned on “mental time travel” struck a nerve (yes, that’s a cognitive sciences pun) for many suffering during the isolation at the heights of Covid-19. We talk about our brain’s default mode network, why mind wandering shouldn’t get a bad rap, peak performance and generating novel concepts, what it means to focus on not focusing, carrying out future intentions and prospective memory, the psychology of film and particularly a look at Alfred Hitchcock’s “Bang! You’re Dead”, cognitive closure and its effect of information seeking, and finally, future simulations. Reference list: The unusual uses task study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22941876/ The freestyle rapper and fMRI study: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00834 Hitchcock film study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26658578/ How the Brain Reacts to Scrambled Stories : https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/01/linear-storytelling-psychology/431529/ Reading Literary Fiction makes us better decisionmakers: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10400419.2013.783735?cookieSet=1 Marginal stupidity: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/lux_capital/issues/securities-by-lux-capital-marginal-stupidity-1209105

Episode reading list: The future of crypto regulation: Highlights from the Brookings event Lux + Tactic funding announcement Fourteen years after the release of the Bitcoin white paper, Web3 and crypto are transitioning into adolescence. Technologies and communities that have collectively been a financial Wild West are slowly but inexorably transforming into mainstream infrastructure powering payments, finance, banking, and even identity and data storage. That transition though is hampered by a data and security stack that remains, let’s just say, well below the norms expected for modern software (which itself is below the expectations for data protection that consumers actually demand). The gap between the visions of a secure Web3 future and today’s current technology is the opportunity to propel crypto through its awkward teen years. I, Danny Crichton, wanted to talk more about where Web3 infrastructure is headed, and so I asked my Lux Capital partner Grace Isford as well as Ann Jaskiw, founder and CEO of crypto accounting platform Tactic, to walk through today’s looming clouds in crypto regulations and why the future is about to get a whole lot brighter. We discuss Grace’s investment in Tactic and how Ann migrated from building secure healthcare technologies to figuring out accounting for the crypto world. We then talk about the Web3 infrastructure stack and its pockmarked reliability, The Merge’s effect on Ethereum’s future and Vitalik Buterin’s leadership role in the energy-saving transition, international dimensions of crypto security, as well as how the SEC is pivoting toward crypto regulation and why crypto founders are increasingly pro-regulation.

Episode reading list:  Forging the Industrial Network the Nation Needs Defense Fordism and AI Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy The Return of Industrial Warfare America spends more money on defense than ever, with a budget that more than doubled in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Despite those dizzying appropriations though, America is now down to just 5 big prime defense contractors, consolidated from dozens during the Cold War. It’s a pattern of consolidation, higher costs, and diminished resiliency and flexibility seen in sectors throughout the U.S. economy. As the stakes have grown for American defense, however, there are increasingly acute concerns about what our diminished capacity for defense means for the country’s long-term security. Today, we bring on James “Hondo” Geurts to talk more about the crisis in the defense industrial base. Geurts most recently performed the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy and formerly was Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development & Acquisition, in charge of the Navy’s more than $100 billion annual budget. Lux Capital is also deeply interested in recapitalizing the future of the defense industrial base and bringing more attention to emerging threats across all theaters of defense, including cyber, space, networking, and more in both state and civilian contexts. To that end, Hondo and Lux teamed up to create the Lux Security + Tech Index built on Thematic to offer investors a more methodical way to invest in the future of security. Also joining host Danny Crichton is Steve Carpenter, CEO and founder of Thematic. In this episode, we talk about the importance of the new “industrial network” era of defense, the consequences of the 1990s post-Cold War peace dividend, how large projects like the F-35 and the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier drive consolidation, the value of simplicity in defense acquisition, the failure of the Defense Department’s high research expenditures, the need to shift from “program of record” to “capability of need”, and finally, details about the new Lux Security + Tech Index and its construction. As a reminder, all investments are risky, and nothing in this episode should be construed as an endorsement of any specific investment product for any individual listener. Always do your own research.

Stanford University is at the beating heart of Silicon Valley and has become almost a rite of passage for generations of entrepreneurs. But how does each generation form, and what skills and mindsets should they be equipped with given our changing world? No one has thought more about how to shape that entrepreneurial spirit than Dr. Tina Seelig. Seelig is the Executive Director of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars program at Stanford among many other leadership roles, and she is also the author of Creativity Rules: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and into the World as well as What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. Joining Seelig is host Danny Crichton and Lux Capital partner Grace Isford. We talk about Seelig’s class “Inventing the Future” and how she guides students in considering the utopian and dystopian aspects of the future technologies that are shaping our everyday lives. We also talk about generational differences between students over the past two decades, from the 9/11 generation to the global financial crisis and Covid-19 generations and how global events influence the approach of budding entrepreneurs. Then we walk through how to teach leadership, how to increase luck, and why there is such an important correlation between optimism and agency.

Agricultural commodities is a bit like accounting: you only hear news stories about it when things go wrong. And unfortunately for the world in 2022, a lot is going wrong in agriculture. Russia’s war on Ukraine has devastated one of the world’s great breadbaskets, and global climate disruptions are wrecking havoc on food productivity. That’s led to soaring inflation and increasingly contentious politics, particularly in the developing world. Sadly, that’s not the only problem the industry faces. Commodities are still traded predominantly on antiquated systems, with the UN estimating that more than 275 million emails are exchanged annually to ship about 11,000 vessels of grain across the oceans. That’s one reason why Lux led the $7 million seed round for Vosbor earlier this summer to build the first digital agricultural commodities exchange. I wanted to understand more of this extraordinarily complex industry, and so I asked two former CEOs of the largest agriculture commodities companies in the world to weigh in. Joining me (@DannyCrichton) on “Securities” today is Chris Mahoney, former CEO of Glencore Agriculture and now known as Viterra, as well as Soren Schroder, former CEO of Bunge. We’ll talk about the cyclicality of agricultural markets, the cost disease of infrastructure upgrades, the geopolitical strategies of ag firms, the increasing focus on logistics capabilities, and what the future of digitalization and technology have in store for this critical industry.

“Securities” podcast host Danny Crichton and producer Chris Gates talk about the latest newsletter issue, “Truth and reputations.” Reputations are always a trailing indicator of truth. When people and organizations are rising, reputations obviously lag — the public has never heard of these new upstarts, and its opinion remains unformed. Reputations gallop to catch up, and for a brief moment perhaps, the true quality and the perceived quality intersect. Inevitably decline sets in, whether in an individual’s career or in an organization’s penchant for adding listless bureaucracy and complexity. The public reputation remains robust, but the underlying quality has etiolated. Perception has now overshot truth.Last week, we saw three stories that illuminate the dynamics of truth versus perception: Adam Neumann’s $350 million fundraise for Flow; SoftBank’s historic quarterly loss and Masayoshi Son’s investment acumen; and then, the CDC director’s call for a complete reform of her beleaguered agency. We talk about these three stories, plus a Lux Recommends article.

Humans have been bartering and trading for millennia, building extraordinarily complex mechanisms of exchange centered on fiat currencies, contracts, and trust. As cryptocurrencies have emerged this past decade, economists and incentive designers have been forced to consider how to construct new forms of currency without the social lubricant of trust. How can we prove that every market participant is incentive aligned with market goals? What contributions can game theory, theoretical computer science, cryptography and microeconomics make to this newly energized field?  That’s the subject of this episode of “Securities” with Christian Catalini, the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. He and his colleagues fuse the fields of economics and computer science together with the goal of analyzing decentralized marketplaces and applications. It’s just the latest endeavor for Catalini, who is also a Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the co-creator of Diem (formerly known as Libra), and the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Lightspark. Joining host Danny Crichton is Lux’s own Grace Isford, who invests in web3 and crypto infrastructure and is based in New York City. We’ll talk about the growing community of crypto infrastructure analysts, the now-famous MIT Bitcoin Experiment, how academics are translating their work into crypto, and how to think about stablecoins in the aftermath of Luna’s collapse this year.