Podcast Review: 80,000 Hours - Elizabeth Cox
changing my mind on animation
Here are my personal notes/takeaways from the 80,000 Hours podcast with Elizabeth Cox around building an animation studio focused on impact (Should We Studio) - you can find the full of the episode transcript here
Should We recently put out their first project Ada explores which explore AI, gene drive, artificial wombs, should we be able to sell kidneys (see The moral case for paying kidney donors).
Ada is self described as
Should we eradicate mosquitoes? Create superintelligent AI? Create artificial wombs? These are some of the questions on Ada’s mind as she heads to the first day of her new job at the public library. She soon realizes her daily reality–mundane duties, grumpy boss–is completely at odds with the urgency she feels about the pressing problems facing humanity.
Ada struggles to balance this reality with the future she imagines, where she explores her big ideas with anyone who will listen–her boss, her grandmother, or an unsuspecting visitor to the library.
Ada is a five episode series that explores the ethical and social implications of new technologies. Each episode features two visually distinct worlds: Ada’s reality and the future she imagines. Each episode’s imagined future showcases new environments, color palettes, textures, and character designs that reflect the episode’s topic
You can watch the trailer here it will be coming out in Q1 2024
I will be honest I was not expecting this to be that interesting of an episode and that I would drop off within the first 15-30m of listening to it. I ended up listening to it entirely and was quite engaged with it.
I found the episode interesting for two reasons
I am pretty anti-animation, I dislike watching and don’t really like even reading that much fiction. This episode started to change my mind
I read this tweet the other day that was something like “all your thoughts are downstream from what you consume” (couldn’t find it but heres an exa query for similar). This episode really drills into that given the studio is very conscious in shaping the impact their media has (but in a longtermist way not pushing some political agenda)
Here were some points that were interesting / unique
There was this super interesting part of the conversation where they were talking about AI and how it can change work. They mentioned how its slightly concerning that with the pace of AI growth it will likely take over a lot of creative work. I somewhat agree with this from the standpoint of The future of search is Generative but not in the sense of there will be far less creative roles in the future.
This was curious because a majority of conversations I have is that AI will automate a bunch of grunt work and let us be more creative (not the opposite), so this was a refreshing view
There was a ton of cool examples of ways in which content has influenced opinion at the highest level. For example
Movies like The Day After influenced Reagan on nuclear policy
An Inconvenient Truth led to measurable increases in carbon offsets in areas where it screened
The Andromeda Strain helped shift Nixon's views on bioweapons
There was this great point around how often content producers are batting 1 in 100 (or more) and that if you are a producer and you care about a certain impact you should produce content for it but you might not necessarily be the one to produce the one that is heavily influential to public opinion.
It feels like the last year or two the shift in sentiment towards Nuclear power is one of the largest shifts in public opinion it’s now not just a ESG clean energy thing but we need a significant amount of power going forward and nuclear is one of the best ways to do so (alternatively read The solar industrial revolution is the biggest investment opportunity in history).
Elizabeth also has this thing were whenever watching a movie / show she will read the wikipedia plot before hand. At first this seems crazy to read the spoilers but she argued it well. Now instead of not knowing what is going to happen you can focus on watching how it will happen which might be more stimulating anyway.
This point tails into the fact that I have been out on animation for a while but maybe I need to focus on the execution of the animation instead.
The most impactful book I have read is Radical Markets it really got me thinking of various alternative economic ideas like the Harberger Tax.
If you liked quick rambling review like this let me know! I plan on posting more regularly as I consume various content. You can find them all at https://press.adjacentresearch.xyz/t/review