How much to spend, Universal High Income, CEO turnover, de minimus, Quantum...
Today's accelerated business environment requires a different investment lens.
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Smarter in 30 seconds
- 🧭 Perspective Shift — Today’s world demands do → learn, not learn → do. The critical question is: How much must we spend to find out what works?
- ⏲️ Faster Insights — Sharpen questions, break them into working parts, and track time & money to minimize wasted effort.
- ⚡ Control & Visibility — Prototyping, parallel small bets, and a “learning ledger” turn uncertainty into a managed cycle of discovery.
- 📉 Macro Signals — Core inflation ticked up to 2.9%; consumer spending now outpaces income; and CEO turnover is at record highs.
- 🌍 Debt & Tariffs — Global investors hesitate on government bonds, while the end of the U.S. de minimis tariff exemption raises costs for 1.4B small-package imports.
- 🤖 AI & Work Resilience — Roles combining AI literacy with judgment, creativity, and emotional intelligence remain most durable; healthcare lags due to data scarcity.
- 🔮 Tech Horizons — From “Universal High Income” memes to $320M quantum rounds, to flying car preorders, the pace of change keeps accelerating.
- 🔐 Vibe Coding vs InfoSec - High profile examples of security holes in AI created apps are giving teams 2nd thoughts.
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[emerging tech]
AI, Universal High Income, Vibe Coding vs InfoSec, Quantum, Flying Cars!
💰AI and Universal Income
How to make your job AI-Proof per Gizmodo:
- "focus on fields where human judgment, creativity, and emotional intelligence remain crucial. Data shows that roles combining AI literacy with personal, physical expertise—like healthcare, technical educators, and consultants—tend to be more resilient."
- "Healthcare has seen a slow adoption due to the scarcity of accessible datasets, because less than 10% of surgical data is publicly available, hampered by strict regulations and data fragmentation."
"Universal High Income" is a meme getting attention again this week: see this X search result set for a rundown of the different quotes and reactions. This seems to be part of a set of more optimistic outlooks (see End State 2030 for another example) that run counter to MIT's 1970's "limits to growth" theory predicting societal collapse by 2040.
My 2cents: Nice to see optimistic takes, but there are a lot of details to sort through before even Universal basic income becomes workable - not to mention Universal high income. For one, we would have to devise an easily accessible common ownership model that allows people to take an ownership stake in fleets of robots that do work - much the same way people can derive income and wealth from taking ownership stakes in companies (ie stocks).
If we treat this like a "challenge accepted" and then work hard to make it happen, then we'll have higher chances of making it work than if we just assume it's a manifest destiny.
This helps ward off the darker scenario hinted at by the awkward question: Is "Universal High Income" just a pipe dream dangled by billionaires to keep the masses calm while robots steal their jobs? It's entirely possible.
But there are a couple other angles to consider:
- A lot of employment comprises work we should be embarrassed to call jobs. David Graeber noted that corporate bureaucracies have become what he aptly labeled "vast engines of nonsense" that force people to waste their talent on mind-numbing unfulfilling forms of work just to pay their bills. If there's a chance to offload grunt work to robots, while preserving financial security, that's worth exploring.
- People happen to like the things that other people create - whether it's music, art, experiences, hikes, gifts, food or beer. That's unlikely to change, and offers a glimpse into a timeless economy. Think about what you like doing on your vacation. These are the things we're supposed to be doing. Were it not for a glitch in the world, you'd probably be doing those things 365 days a year.
Maybe we have a shot at getting to do more of what we're supposed to be doing vs. serving as custodians of those "engines of nonsense."
☢️ Vibe Coding vs InfoSec
For CISOs: Vibe Coding has a bad security vibe...Investors (and customers) beware. AI-developed apps are prone to generating non-secure approaches - even backdoors - for apps.
Wiz Research identified one such security vulnerability in Base44 that allowed unauthorized access to private apps. Security teams are scrambling to set up review processes for scrutinizing AI-generated code.
⚛️ Private quantum start‑ups continue to raise large funding rounds
Investors are pumping increasingly large funding round into Quantum technology as breakthroughs proliferate:
- IQM Quantum Computers secured $320 million in a Series B round, boosting its total funding to $600 million.
- Quantinuum reaches $10B valuation.
Quantum breakthroughs seem to be bringing generally available quantum computing closer than previously predicted.
- A new cryogenic chip design uses could minimize power use, while maximizing scalability.
- This UC Irvine research recently discovered a previously unknown state of quantum matter that could enable high powered radiation resistant rechargeable compute on deep space missions.
- Another breakthrough harnesses "heavy" electrons to achieve higher performance at normal room temperatures.
Flying around the Bay
Preorder your flying car from Alef, the Silicon Valley company that started limited flight operations in the Bay Area this week.
[macro-economics]
Core Inflation, CEO Turnover, Bonds, de minimis Fallout
Full Access Members: See the S3T Economic Dashboard for the Top 500+ US & International real-time economic indicators.
- Core inflation hit 2.9% in July, highest since Feb. And in the latest data, consumer spending outpaced income - a sign households are dipping into savings.
- CEO turnover rates are highest since tracking began in 2002
- Global investors who in other times would gladly buy government bonds are increasingly hesitant due to worries about government debt levels and the economic grind down of tariffs.
Watch Item: How will end of the de minimis tariff exemption impact the US economy? On August 29 the "de minimis" tariff exemption (allowing packages valued at $800 or less to enter the US without tariffs) expired. This means the cost of orders from international merchants will rise, and shipping firms like UPS and Fedex will have to shoulder the additional work of tracking and collecting tariffs on all packages rather than jus the ones valued at $800 or more. Last year 1.4 billion packages worth a total of $64B entered the US. See Fedex guide to tariffs.
[perspective]
🧭 How Much Do You Have to Spend to Find Out?
Today's accelerated business environment requires a different investment lens.
Whether you are:
- In healthcare or pharma facing rapid obsoletion of old business patterns
- In tech facing changing regulations and new waves of competitors
- In finance facing the remaking of the worlds financial architecture
Instead of working from certainty, we are always working from uncertainty. Instead of "learn then do", today its "do, then learn".
So the most important issue now is not "what do we do?" but rather, how much do we have to invest in order to find out (what to do)?
Let's break this down:
The acceleration of emerging tech innovation combined with today’s rapidly evolving economy forces organizations to be in constant discovery mode finding out what works and what doesn't. The old cycle of "plan a strategy, then do a series of projects to implement that magnificent strategy" is obsolete. Nothing is certain for long.
Leadership teams are struggling - the way a football team might struggle if it were suddenly forced to play basketball: no more huddles, just constant motion with on-the-fly adjustments.
In similar fashion today's organizations must operate in non-stop learning mode - a continuous cycle of asking questions, then finding the shortest, most cost effective way to answer them.
The good news is, we can learn to manage this new continuous flow of activity in a way that helps position teams for better success.