Using a panel of 81 countries across six World Values Survey waves (1990–2022), we examine whether growth in internet diffusion is associated with religious decline. We construct a six-item composite religiosity index, align annual macro series to wave periods, and estimate country fixed-effects models with one-wave lags and a broad set of modernization, demographic, welfare-state, and cultural controls. We also estimate models separately for individual dimensions of religiosity. Across specifications, lagged internet penetration is negatively associated with religiosity within countries over time. These results remain robust under period dummies and in models estimated without lags, although reverse-ordering tests indicate that prior religiosity can also predict later internet use. Associations are strongest for denominational belonging and self-identification as a religious person. Overall, internet diffusion emerges as a robust macro-level correlate of within-country religious decline.

Here is the full article by Miran Lavrič and Tibor Rutar.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

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Rishabh received his grant to build a platform for real-time updates from Delhi courts, making judicial activity easier to track and understand.

Hari and Naveen received their grant for Archgen AI, an agentic ecosystem connecting legacy EDA tools with AI workflows for semiconductor chip design.

Shubh, 18, received his grant to scale robotics using world models.

Sarthak Ahuja received his grant for Hypertensight, a smartphone-based system for detecting hypertensive retinopathy, now deployed in over 18 Indian villages. His project was also published in the International Journal of Computer Science and Engineering in 2024.

Michaela Talwar, received her grant for AltShows.com, an artist-run ticketing and discovery platform for India’s alternative arts ecosystem.

Avyukt Jindal, 16, received his grant to develop a nonlinear operator framework and pursue related work in condensed matter and other fields.

Anirudh Anilkumar, 29, and AV Surya Vardhan, 26, received their grant for Fe-rry, developing IoT-enabled modular point-of-care diagnostics for blood testing anywhere.

Bhanvi Kumar, a fourth-year Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering undergraduate at IIT Kharagpur, received her grant to study cellular reprogramming and cancer cell-state transitions.

Samanvya Hooda received his grant for nuclear strategy research in the Indo-Pacific using Mandarin sources and quantitative methods.

Pradyumn Chaudhary received his grant to build a low-cost, customizable augmented-reality prototype for practical use.

Jay Handa, 16, received his grant to build SMAC (Swing Match AI for Coaches), an AI-powered golf swing analysis platform for coaches.

Sajeeva Ratnam Nepala, 28, founder of Helen Bikes, received his grant to develop a series-hybrid pedal system for the first fully electric hubless bicycle.

Hitendra Singh, cofounder of Spantrik, received his grant to develop reusable rockets, including the Leapfrogger demonstrator; he has built and flown over 100 high-powered rockets.

Avi Mohan Kumar Shuklaa, 17, received his grant for a solar-powered AI elephant deterrent using seismic and radar sensor fusion, already field-deployed in Jharkhand.

Surya Uthkarsha, 14, received his grant for Flake AI, infrastructure that converts websites into editable designs and reflects changes in the underlying codebase.

Kritarth Agrawal received his grant for Sakshya, an AI-powered document-intelligence platform for India’s compliance and regulatory ecosystem.

Tejas Pugalia, 13, received his grant to advance his research on the Ramanujan-tau function and prepare for the International Mathematical Olympiad.

Arnav, 17, from Navi Mumbai, received his grant to build a $200 diagnostic pen intended as an alternative to a $3,000 Parkinson’s scan.

Arjan Chaudhary, 15, received his grant for GGameChamps, which structures competitive-gameplay data for analytics and AI use.

Satadru Chakrabarty, Ph.D., received his grant to develop an affordable multiplexed point-of-care diagnostic using de novo antibodies for liver-function testing in rural India.

Varun Bajpai received his grant for the Biological Data Network (BDN-04), a bio-integrated communication architecture exploring human muscle tissue for data transmission.

Semil Vaghasiya, 24, received his grant to develop sensor-free, 3D-printed hoof pads that use wear-deformation to predict equine injuries.

Kanukant Om Gupta and Mansi Gupta received their grant for Clearquik, to make customs clearance in India simpler, more transparent, and legitimate.

Parth Anand, 15, received his grant for research on temporal hallucinations in large language models across Western and non-Western domains. His paper was accepted for an oral presentation by the Society for Study for Artificial Intelligence and Simulation Behaviour XTAI symposium.

Shadman Sakib received his grant for youth development, communication, practical career guidance, and accessible learning initiatives in Bangladesh; his content reaches over 160,000 subscribers.

Sk Reezaal Arafat, 16, received his grant for Project SATARK, a decentralized agricultural fire-interception grid combining AI, IoT sensors, and a local response network in rural West Bengal.

Manan Gupta received his grant for Artemis, a proactive AI layer that lets users control their digital life through a phone call.

Srijal Dutta received his grant for ZSMC Co., an independent research initiative working across emerging technologies and engineering.

Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth , sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.

And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.

If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at srajagopalan@mercatus.gmu.edu.

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2. Urban harassment of women in India.

3. The making of Roger Scruton?

4. Astra vs. Enigma.

5. Coetzee on genocide.

6. Dan Ariely update.  And running for office in Israel.

7. A more sober look at the HuggingFace incident (WSJ).

8. Cass Sunstein on AI regulation and China.

9. New UAP videos, with modest explanatory notes.

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Here we introduce Paper2Agent, an automated framework that converts research papers into artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Paper2Agent transforms research output from passive artefacts into active systems that accelerate use and discovery. Conventional research papers require readers to understand and adapt the paper’s code, data and methods to their work, creating barriers to dissemination and reuse. Paper2Agent addresses this challenge by converting a paper into an AI agent that functions as a virtual corresponding author, exposing its manuscript, supplementary materials, datasets, code and workflows as active, agent-native knowledge rather than static text. It analyses the paper and codebase using multiple agents to construct a model context protocol (MCP) server, then generates and runs tests to refine and increase robustness of the MCP. These paper MCPs can be connected to a chat agent (such as Claude Code) to carry out complex scientific queries through natural language while invoking tools and workflows from the paper. We demonstrate Paper2Agent’s effectiveness through case studies. Paper2Agent created an agent that leveraged AlphaGenome¹ to interpret genomic variants and agents based on Scanpy² and TISSUE (transcript imputation with spatial single-cell uncertainty estimation)³ to conduct single-cell and spatial transcriptomics analyses. We validate that these agents reproduce the results of the original papers and carry out novel user queries. Paper2Agent created multiple agents that collaborate to prioritize a causal gene for psoriasis. By turning static papers into interactive AI agents, Paper2Agent introduces a paradigm for knowledge dissemination and a collaborative ecosystem of AI co-scientists.

As I have been saying for a while now, there is much more of this coming down the pike.  Via Charles Klingman.

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And this leads to the most interesting part of this story: how the highlanders were so isolated for so long.

I want to acknowledge that the highlanders were not completely, hermetically sealed off from the outside world – it’s just that knowledge of outside world never actually made it to them or vice versa.

Over time, a few goods did make their way up to the highlands: pigs, about 3,000 years ago; the sweet potato, which is South American and arrived about 300 to 400 years ago; and tobacco, also American, which came the same way.

The journey the sweet potato and tobacco took to get there is a good example of how this all worked without transmitting further information. The Spanish and Portuguese brought both plants to the spice islands (in what is now Indonesia), just off the western tip of New Guinea, in the 1500s. The sultanates had been trading with the western tip of the coastal region of New Guinea for centuries. So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her. Each new family then planted the same, saw that it worked, and passed it on. At that pace the sweet potato crossed the highlands in a century or two, with nobody knowing where it came from beyond the tribe beside them.

And what fascinates me is that even with the highlands as sealed off as they were, such significant goods still got in. Sweet potatoes allowed a population explosion in the highlands: they give far more calories per acre, and pigs can live off them. So in a 10,000 year sealed off universe, after the invention of agriculture, the biggest change to highland life happened in the last 500 years, which I guess isn’t a coincidence, as the sweet potato got there through the same structural forces that later brought the Australians.

Here is much more from Daniel Frank, fascinating throughout.

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2. Ingeborg Bachmann centenary.

3. “Huawei Technologies Co. predicted on Wednesday that global computing demand will surge 100,000-fold by 2035, with AI agents generating over 90% of network traffic.”  And a report from someone who has done AI diplomacy with China (NYT).

4. “US Gov Federal Register use distilled Qwen models in their search mode.”

5. How well do financial economics papers replicate?

6. DeepMind Institute.

The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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If COVID began with a laboratory leak—plausible, though unproven—then a research accident has already killed millions. Whatever its origin, COVID demonstrated the scale of the potential damage. AI surely increases pandemic risks. If you have ever used AI to fix your washing machine, you understand the difference between reading a manual and having a tutor by your side helping to troubleshoot each problem. The same distinction matters for biological research at the laboratory bench.

Anthropic’s threat report documents five cases of researchers using its models in ways that “could support biological weapons development.” These included military-linked virus research and plans for work on pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential. Did the researchers intend to build weapons? We don’t know. But some users circumvented access controls and concealed sensitive aspects of their research.

Some safeguards appear to have worked but we don’t know the base rate. And what will happen with open-weight models and AIs not under the control of a large corporation? The safeguards also burden legitimate researchers. We should accept that AI will magnify the power of small groups, ill-intentioned or not.

Of course, AI can accelerate vaccines and treatments too. But faster science does not automatically mean faster defense. Turning discoveries into deployed vaccines and treatments requires institutions that can act quickly. We should not assume those institutions will keep pace with the technology.

That makes the recommendations in my 2025 paper, Pandemic Preparation Without Romance, more urgent (surprise!): wastewater surveillance; prediction markets; pre-developed vaccine libraries; human challenge trials planned in advance; a Pandemic Trust Fund; and temporary Operation Warp Speed–style public–private partnerships.

My paper argues that pandemic policy should not depend on unusually farsighted or wise politicians. Public tripwires and banked resources are what you build when you don’t trust the authorities to move quickly in a crisis hence the value of ideas like wastewater surveillance, vaccine libraries, and ready challenge-trial protocols. None of these technologies is highly expensive nor do they require much in the way of continued investment and attention, hence pandemic preparation without romance.

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Annie Lowrey’s new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you’re poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don’t work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption.

So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity’s role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she’ll learn next, and more.

Excerpt:

LOWREY: The postal service and Social Security’s retirement programs. Those are both pretty good. Social Security also has other programs, SSI, which is mostly used by very, very low-income seniors with disabilities or who are blind. Disability insurance is run by the Social Security Administration. The retirement program, it’s less than 1 percent overhead. It’s great. It does all the work for you.

COWEN: Isn’t our whole postal service a time tax in the aggregate? Denmark, just this year, abolished its postal service. They don’t have any. Now, I understand we’re not in a position to do exactly the same, but shouldn’t we be moving away from postal service, basically zeroing it out over the next 10 years?

LOWREY: Did they make it so that it’s all digital? Did they digitize things?

COWEN: Well, I don’t know who the “they” is. Direct mail there has gone away.

LOWREY: Oh, yes, that’s interesting. I don’t know. I think in a high inequality country such as ours, where you still have a lot of people who don’t have smartphones and don’t have computers, that’s why I would be very concerned about the postal service going away.

COWEN: That’s why we need 10 years. You want to tax people, tax in the broad sense of the term, living in rural areas, if only because it’s much harder to have government help them, right?

LOWREY: Yes.

COWEN: If rural areas don’t get mail anymore, maybe that’s a good thing.

LOWREY: I don’t think that that’s a good thing for the people in the rural areas, though. There’s always going to be people in rural areas. As a general point, do you want the government to be encouraging people to not live in rural areas?

COWEN: Absolutely, that’s me. Welcome to the show.

LOWREY: That’s feels very nanny state-ish of you, Tyler.

COWEN: I don’t want to subsidize rural areas, and we do it in so many ways, including with our farm programs.

LOWREY: We do. We really, really absolutely do.

COWEN: It gets harder to help people with government. There’s a lot more market power in rural areas, like how many supermarkets are there, how many hospitals, probably just one, if that. Let’s get everyone into the suburbs, or heaven forbid, the cities.

LOWREY: I can’t imagine a less popular policy than that.

COWEN: Absolutely.

Interesting throughout, and full of good spirit.  Again, here is Annie’s very good book The Time Tax: How Government Wastes Our Time — And How to Fix It.

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Recently I have been reading my review copy of Kevin Roose’s excellent forthcoming book The AGI Chronicles: The Inside Story of the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence. A major theme of the book—I would say the major theme—is how strong and competitive the rivalries have been between Dario, Altman, and Musk. Each believes that the others cannot be trusted to gain super-powerful AI capabilities.

Thus, when you observe these individuals and their companies jockeying for position and preeminence, it is too cynical to think it is just about the money (each of them already has plenty). The actions of each are rooted in the sincere belief that their own company would best serve the world by winning the race toward very powerful AI.

So when these CEOs plead altruism, you should actually believe them, even though obvious selfish motives also happen to align with their plans. One can reasonably argue about who ought to win the race, but I favor the outcome where all of them, including Meta and Google, roughly tie for first place, and the market remains highly competitive.

So they are selfish in a sense, but along the metric of power, where they perceive (correctly or not) “selfish and altruistic” to be quite closely correlated.  Note I am using the word “power” in a general capabilities sense, you do not have to believe they intend evil coercive exercise in this context.  Furthermore, it is not mainly about “capturing the regulator,” but rather winning in the market and then having an immense ability to achieve ends before the others do.  So yes they are sincerely worried about a host of safety issues, but they are all the more sincerely worried about not being the ones to win the race. To the extent we wish to cite those CEOs as authorities, “who gets it is the most important thing of all” would be the takeaway lesson.

Do note that for all the talk of pause, the race to invest in compute is continuing apace and even intensifying.  That is the real variable to watch.  If a theory does not explain observed behavior toward compute, which of course costs real dollars, the theory is failing to explain what is going on.

Standard competition!  I do not flip out about this.  But obviously there are some world views where you might view these (and other) actors as evil, and furthermore think they can act without much constraint, and so on.  Those are not my world views.  I see a lot of competition and a lot of ego, and then I think of Adam Smith.  Standard stuff, just at much higher stakes than usual.

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2. Prophets of the Marginal Revolution.

3. The university after AI.

4. Which African nations are spending on education?

5. @mattyglesias: “In an all-or-nothing scenario, bond interest rates would go to the moon. Why lend money at 5% (or whatever) if the two options are not being repaid and stocks going through the roof?”

6. David Schleicher on how property taxes are evolving, underrated yet important ideas.  Good sequence.

7. I just bought the new China Mieville book.

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We also have plenty of evidence that the fears of AI experts are sincere. Amodei, Altman and Musk were all publicly warning about AI risk long before they had AI companies to promote. The worry runs well beyond the executive suite; rank and file researchers share it. And it extends outside the industry altogether, to computer scientists with no product to sell, among them Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton left a high-paying job at Google precisely so he could speak out and Hinton is not in a Berkeley polycule with Eliezer Yudkowsky, at least as far as I know. Whatever else you may say about the belief that AI presents a serious risk, plenty of AI researchers believe it sincerely.

Similarly, when Amodei recently proposed to slow the pace and install independent safety teams at AI companies many people jumped to the conclusion that this was regulatory capture. Sorry, but no, that theory doesn’t make sense. To see why, we should review the theory of regulatory capture.

Regulatory capture came out of the political science literature especially Marver Bernstein’s 1955 classic, Regulating Business by Independent Commission. Bernstein argues for a regulatory life cycle: Gestation, Youth, Maturity, Old Age. A scandal brings a bureaucracy into existence—or gives an existing one new powers. The public’s attention, like Sauron’s eye, fixes on the issue of the day: something must be done. The thalidomide scandal, for example, helped establish the modern FDA.

Gestation gives way to a youthful burst of reform and the do-gooders come to Washington ready to battle the industry. Inevitably, however, the public’s eye looks elsewhere. But the industry never looks away. It lobbies Congress, hires former regulators, trains future ones, and supplies much of the information the agency needs. As the agency matures, accommodation replaces confrontation. By old age, the regulator has become the industry’s protector. The classic example is the ICC, created to regulate the railroads but it eventually came to shield them from competition from the trucking industry.

Notice that classic regulatory capture takes time, it’s a process of erosion rather than a battle, it happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye. As Culpepper argues in Quiet Politics and Business Power, business power goes down as political salience goes up. Regulatory capture and lobbying does a good job explaining why roasting coffee beans was defined as “domestic manufacturing”, thereby lowering Starbuck’s tax rate by 2%. It does less well at explaining big cross-industry issues the public cares about such as environmental regulation or race and gender discrimination regulation. Finally, don’t confuse capture with firms making the best of a bad situation. Philip Morris supported the 2009 Tobacco Control Act not because FDA regulation was Philip Morris’s unconstrained ideal but because it knew regulation was coming and it wanted a seat at the table to nudge the rules in its favor. That’s ordinary political bargaining—or rent-seeking—not evidence that the regulator has been captured.

Now let’s evaluate Amodei’s call for regulation in light of regulatory capture theory. AI regulation is in gestation. Public attention is fixed on the industry, and much of that attention is hostile. The big profits in AI lie in automating work, and job loss is a much more salient fear than extinction. AI politics is now loud–precisely the environment in which Culpepper predicts business power will be weakest. A mature industry can bend regulation to its purposes through revolving doors, longstanding relationships and obscure rulemaking. An industry under Sauron’s eye has much less power and faces much greater risk that politics will bend regulation to its purposes. Political actors are eager for an excuse to redistribute AI rents away from capitalists and toward favored groups (ala Peltzman).

Regulation will reduce AI profits. That doesn’t prove that every rule Amodei favors is innocent of self-interest, an absurd proposition. I suspect that Amodei’s ideal may be something like a single regulated AI monopoly—safe and reasonable profitable, like the old AT&T. But that’s not the profit maximizing outcome. If transformative AI can capture even a fraction of the enormous labor market–the world’s biggest market–laissez-faire would mean vastly greater profits. Amodei may simply prefer a smaller fortune and a safer world. That is perfectly consistent with self-interest playing a role; it is not consistent with the bastardized theory that profit maximization is the only thing that matters or that “capture” is universal.

Go ahead: argue that Amodei and other AI experts are wrong about AI risk. Ask whether his proposals favor Anthropic. But calling “our product might kill you” a clever marketing and regulatory-capture strategy isn’t sophisticated analysis. The facts don’t fit regulatory capture theory and trying to make them fit requires epistemically painful Ptolemaic epicycles. Even a dull Ockham’s razor cuts through that story to the obvious alternative: Amodei actually believes what he’s saying.

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Because larger firms are more attractive targets but also invest more in protection, the model generates an inverse-U relationship between firm size and attack risk, consistent with the data. Introducing cyber risk reduces firm entry by 3.6 percent, aggregate productivity by 0.6 percent, and total output by 1.8 percent. These effects arise from general equilibrium adjustments in entry, firm size, and spillovers that are absent in typical partial-equilibrium analyses. Policy responses differ sharply: appropriately designed subsidies and minimum cybersecurity requirements can raise aggregate output, while bailouts reduce it.

Note this is not a paper about AI.  But it may help us develop estimates of the future costs of AI cyberattacks.  We need much more effort in this direction, and I hope this subfield rises in status rapidly.

The post The economics of cyber risk appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

       

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