Category: Stanford

Categories
Stanford

Those Empty Switchbacks

I stopped when I hit this passage in Theo Baker’s new book, How to Rule the World:

“…through the redwood forests so thick with foliage that we couldn’t see the sun… some of the greatest driving roads in the world, with empty switchbacks and hairpins and sweeping corners to test ourselves. Never in my freshman year did I feel freer than on those drives.”

Seventeen years old, newly arrived at Stanford, and already he’d found the loophole. A few minutes off campus, past the ambition and the networking, the road empties out and climbs into redwoods so thick the sun disappears.

I know those roads. I’ve driven them for decades. Skyline on a clear morning, fog still sitting in the valleys. The curves above the coast when the Pacific goes the color of hammered silver. The sudden dark under the redwood canopy, ten degrees colder, the world narrowed to headlights and wet pavement.

Take Skyline up to Mountain House some evening for dinner with friends and you’ve driven the whole argument of this essay without meaning to. A few miles of switchbacks first, the fog closing in and opening up again, and then the parking lot with its redwood out front and the wood carving of Neil Young standing under it, watching you arrive.

What struck me wasn’t nostalgia. It was that Baker had gotten the feeling exactly right. The phone in the cupholder, the next meeting, the slow arithmetic of a life — gone, for the length of a few good corners. Just you, the machine, the light.

I felt an early version of it as a boy, in the back of a blue Dodge Dart, summer of 1960. Every evening my father spread the day’s map across the hood and studied tomorrow’s route. By noon the thin red lines were real places under our wheels. I never lost that. Decades later, living a few miles from the campus Baker writes about, the same lift still comes when the road opens and the hills start to roll.

The switchbacks demand attention and punish you for withholding it. In return: the rare feeling of being exactly where you were, with nowhere else to be. These days I find myself more protective of those pockets, not less.

The roads are still there. The redwoods still offer the same deal they offered a seventeen-year-old freshman. And at the top of the hill, under the big tree, Neil Young keeps watching the cars come up.

Categories
AI Anthropic Economics Stanford

Weak Links, Powerful Ideas

I’ve been thinking about bottlenecks. Not the frustrating kind you encounter in traffic or while debugging code, but the deeper structural constraints that determine how progress unfolds in our lives, organizations, and economies. A single slow step can limit an entire system, regardless of how rapidly everything else improves.

It’s an idea that feels especially relevant today. While AI capabilities continue to advance at a remarkable pace, real-world productivity gains often appear far more gradual.

Enter Chad Jones—the Stanford economist whose work has become increasingly important for anyone trying to understand AI’s long-term economic impact. This week he announced that he will join the Anthropic Institute on leave from Stanford beginning June 30.

The move is noteworthy not simply because of who Jones is, but because of the ideas he brings with him.

The Economist Who Sees Growth Through Tasks and Bottlenecks

Chad Jones (Charles I. Jones) is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been one of the leading scholars studying long-run economic growth: how ideas accumulate, why innovation matters, and why growth rates have remained relatively stable even as the number of researchers worldwide has expanded dramatically.

His influential work helped explain a central paradox of modern economics: adding more researchers does not automatically produce ever-faster growth because, over time, new ideas become increasingly difficult to discover.

More recently, Jones has turned his attention to artificial intelligence. Papers such as A.I. and Our Economic Future and his 2026 collaboration with Chris Tonetti, Past Automation and Future A.I.: How Weak Links Tame the Growth Explosion, examine how advances in automation may reshape economic growth in the decades ahead.

The central insight is deceptively simple:

Economic output is ultimately constrained by its weakest components.

Weak Links: The Economic Version of Amdahl’s Law

Anyone with a background in computing will recognize a familiar pattern.

Amdahl’s Law tells us that even if part of a program becomes infinitely fast, overall performance remains constrained by the portion that cannot be parallelized. Accelerating 90 percent of a workload by a factor of a million still leaves the remaining 10 percent as a hard limit on total speedup.

Jones’ “weak links” framework applies a similar logic to the broader economy.

In task-based models where tasks are complements rather than easy substitutes, every task matters. Extraordinary progress in a handful of areas does not automatically translate into extraordinary gains for the system as a whole if critical bottlenecks remain.

Historically, a large share of productivity growth has come from automation—the transfer of tasks from human labor to rapidly improving machines and capital. Jones and Tonetti argue that much of past productivity growth can be understood through this lens. The breakthrough is not merely building better machines; it is expanding the range of tasks that machines can perform.

The AI Timeline Paradox

Looking ahead, the same logic applies to AI.

Even as advanced models automate larger portions of cognitive and physical work, growth may continue to be constrained by:

  • Tasks that still require human judgment or participation
  • Regulatory and institutional frictions
  • Physical-world coordination challenges

As a result, Jones’ modeling suggests that economic growth may accelerate substantially while still unfolding more gradually than either enthusiasts or skeptics expect.

This perspective offers a useful middle ground between two popular extremes: the belief that transformative AI-driven abundance is imminent and the belief that AI’s impact will prove largely illusory. Progress can be both real and constrained. The chain remains only as strong as its weakest link.

From Theory to Practice

One reason Jones’ work resonates with me is that it extends beyond economics.

Many successful builders and leaders instinctively operate according to a weak-links philosophy. Whether in engineering, manufacturing, logistics, or organizational design, the greatest gains often come from identifying the single constraint that limits the system and focusing disproportionate effort on removing it.

Consider how Elon Musk has approached challenges at Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. Across very different domains, a recurring pattern emerges: identify the binding constraint, concentrate resources there, remove it, and then move to the next bottleneck.

Jones’ framework provides an economic explanation for why this approach can be so effective. In systems composed of complementary tasks, relieving a key constraint can create benefits that ripple throughout the entire system.

Why This Resonates

What I find most compelling about Jones’ work is its intellectual balance.

It neither dismisses the remarkable capabilities emerging from frontier AI systems nor assumes that technological progress automatically translates into social or economic transformation. Instead, it directs attention toward the frictions, constraints, and complementarities that determine how change actually unfolds.

At a time when conversations about AI often oscillate between utopian abundance and existential catastrophe, this framework offers something rarer: a disciplined way of thinking about progress.

The weak-links perspective reminds us that the future may be shaped less by spectacular breakthroughs than by our ability to identify and address the constraints that prevent those breakthroughs from creating widespread value.

A Chain and a Compass

There is a quiet power in recognizing weak links—whether in economies, organizations, projects, or our own lives. The places where progress feels slow or frustrating are often where the greatest leverage resides.

Jones’ research provides a language for understanding those constraints, and his move to the Anthropic Institute suggests that some of the most important conversations about AI’s future may increasingly take place at the intersection of research, policy, and real-world deployment.

For that reason alone, this is a development worth watching.

If you’re interested in exploring the underlying ideas, I recommend starting with Jones’ recent papers on his Stanford faculty site, along with Anthropic’s announcement of the Institute and its mission.

Categories
AI Stanford

The Unit of Production Just Collapsed

The lecture was a Stanford CS session, AI-native companies, Garry Tan walking through what it now takes to build something. He’d rebuilt his old startup, Posterous, in five days on a modest Claude plan. A thing that once required a team and a runway. He said it matter-of-factly, the way you describe something that’s already obvious to you and hasn’t yet reached everyone else.

The argument Tan and his colleague Diana Hu were making wasn’t really about AI. It was about the economics of effort — specifically, what breaks when the cost of turning an idea into a working thing falls by an order of magnitude.

Their framing: AI-native organizations running as closed-loop systems, agents with access to the real artifacts of work, able to iterate without the error-accumulation that comes from handoffs and headcount. Revenue-per-employee ratios of a million dollars or more, with live examples already in the YC portfolio. Document processing, logistics, voice agents for specialized workflows.

What I kept hearing underneath all of it was a quieter claim: the mental model of what a startup requires is wrong.

Or rather, it’s right about the past and increasingly wrong about the present.

The assumptions embedded in “I can’t do this alone” or “we’d need to hire for that” or “we don’t have the bandwidth” — those are load-bearing assumptions, and the load is shifting.

I have some small version of this — not as a founder, but as someone who retired into curiosity. The blog, the reading, the daily effort to keep up with what’s moving: each one is a practice in staying oriented while the map keeps changing.

What I notice is that the constraint has shifted. It’s not information anymore. It’s not even tools. It’s the capacity to ask better questions of the abundance, to know what matters when everything is accelerating.

That’s the thing I find unsettling, yet also genuinely interesting: the skills that remain irreplaceable are the hardest ones to teach, and the hardest to evaluate in yourself. Knowing what matters. Recognizing when an output is almost right and almost wrong. Setting direction in ambiguous conditions and being willing to be wrong about it. These were always the valuable things. They were just obscured by all the coordination overhead that surrounded them.

The students in that Stanford course were asked to build something called a One-Person Frontier Lab — use the best available tools to extend your own reach over ten weeks. It’s framed as an academic exercise. It doesn’t feel like one.

But I’m not building. I’m mostly watching, and thinking about what this radical new fermentation does to everything downstream — to labor markets, to what a company even is, to how we’ll organize work and meaning when the old unit of production no longer applies. Those are slower questions. But they’re the ones that feel urgent to me.

The old excuses are getting lighter. Not that everything is possible — but that the weight of the usual constraints has changed.

What you choose to build, and whether you choose to build it at all, is more purely a decision than it used to be. That’s either clarifying or terrifying, depending on the day and my mood.

Categories
Science Stanford

Bypassing the Leaf

For my entire life, I’ve understood the world through a simple, quiet equation: green plants take sunlight and air, and turn them into the stuff of life. It is a slow, terrestrial magic we all learn in grade school.

But lately, after listening to Professor Drew Endy at Stanford, I’ve been sitting with a curious yet exciting realization: that ancient equation is being rewritten.

Professor Endy champions a concept called electrobiosynthesis, or eBio. At its core, it represents the engineering of a parallel carbon cycle that operates independently of traditional photosynthesis.

The global industrial complex is approaching a transition point where our traditional reliance on extractive fossil fuels is being superseded by a regenerative, biological manufacturing paradigm.

For millennia, humanity has relied on the biological “middleman” of the plant to capture solar energy. But natural photosynthesis, for all its quiet beauty, is limited by severe biochemical constraints. Most commercial crops convert less than 1% of incident solar energy into usable biomass.

Electrobiosynthesis changes the math. By bypassing the plant entirely, we can utilize high-efficiency photovoltaics—which capture over 20% of the sun’s energy—to drive carbon fixation directly into the metabolic hubs of engineered microbes. This fixed carbon is transformed into organic molecules, serving as the feedstocks for high-value products like proteins and specialty chemicals.

In my own career, I’ve watched industries undergo profound, structural phase shifts. This really feels like another one of them. It seems that we are looking at a future where any molecule that can be encoded in DNA can be grown locally and on-demand. This fundamentally decouples manufacturing from centralized industrial nodes and fragile global supply chains.

The field appears to currently be in its “transistor moment,” moving from laboratory feasibility to industrial pilot plants. It signifies the ability to construct and sustain life-like processes without being restricted to the terrestrial lineage of photosynthesis.

Of course, with such foundational power comes the weight of unintended consequences. The ability to engineer life at this level brings severe biosecurity risks, and even the “Sputnik-like” strategic challenge of international competition in biotechnology. There are profound ethical dilemmas on the horizon, such as the creation of “mirror life”—organisms made from mirror-image biomolecules that might be invisible to natural ecosystems.

But the trajectory seems set. The vision described by Professor Endy—a world where we grow what we need, wherever we are, using only air and electricity—is no longer a distant science fiction. It is a nascent industrial reality. This future is being written not in sprawling factories, but in the microscopic architecture of the cell.

I’ve just now reading a deep research report on this whole area that I asked Google Gemini to create. It’s fascinating and I’ve discovered a whole new area (beyond AI) to explore further.

Categories
iPhone 11 Pro Max Palo Alto Photography Stanford

Stone River

While heading to the Anderson Collection at Stanford I stopped by Andy Goldsworthy’s sculpture Stone River which lies in the field just across the street. Built from fragments from Stanford buildings damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it’s beautifully crafted and well worth a visit. All of these images were made with my iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Categories
iPhone 11 Pro Max Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Stanford

Light Fun with Sequence

While I was waiting for the Anderson Collection at Stanford to open one recent morning (at 11 AM) I walked around back behind the Cantor Arts Center to Richard Serra’s Sequence sculpture. It was a bright sunny morning so I played a bit with the light and shadows on the curves of the steel.

These images were all made with my iPhone 11 Pro Max and processed to black and white using Snapseed. I especially like using Snapseed for monochrome conversion because of the color filters it provides.

Categories
iPhone 11 Pro Max Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Stanford

Shadow Slice

As I was walking from the Anderson Collection to the Cantor Arts Center on a recent morning, I noticed these shadows from the palm trees lining the street. I loved the abstract nature of this image – and tried to bring out that mood further by processing into black and white. Once again, I made this image using my iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Categories
Photography Stanford

Now at Cantor: Outside Looking In

Last year The Capital Group Foundation gifted a remarkable collection of over a thousand 20th century American photographs to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Cantor has been exhibiting from this collection – beginning with last fall’s display of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston photographs. Today the next exhibition is now up – with photographs from John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, and Wright Morris.

Each of these photographers has a distinctive style which this exhibition mixes beautifully. I was not familiar with Gutmann’s work – but really enjoyed discovering how he captured moments from unique perspectives. Levitt’s New York City photographs (in a mix of both black and white and color) are more familar. Morris’ photographs from the American midwest are uniquely different yet again.

Here’s one of Gutmann’s photographs on the cover of the brochure available at the exhibition which is sitting in my lap. Such a great image with that hand coming out of the broken window!

If you’re able, be sure to visit Cantor between now and April 26, 2020. Cantor doesn’t charge admission – making it a delight for me who lives about 10 minutes away enabling frequent visits! Parking can be challenging up until 4 PM during the week but very available on most weekends. Cantor is open six days each week – closing on Tuesdays.

Categories
Art and Artists Photography Photography - Black & White Stanford

Another Ansel

I recently visited Cantor Art Museum at Stanford to see a temporary small exhibition of Ansel Adams’ work: Surf Sequence. It’s an exhibition of five of his photographs taken in 1940 along the San Mateo county coastline looking down at the surf as the waves move in and out over the sand.

Surf Sequence

They’re beautiful images – as usual with his work. Even more interesting to me, however, were two other images on the opposite wall taken in the late 1920’s of a skier coming down a ski run on Mount Watkins in Yosemite (both images shown below taken with an iPhone 11 Pro Max).

Skiing on Mount Watkins, Yosemite High Sierra
Skiing on Mount Watkins, Yosemite High Sierra

These images remind me of one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s drawings – Winter Road – although I’m sure one didn’t directly influence the other!

Winter Road

Winter Road comes from one of O’Keeffe’s books of early drawings and we studied it along with some of her other work during a workshop I attended last summer in Santa Fe. The image above was taken with my iPhone at a wonderful exhibition of her work – Living Modern – that I saw last August at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

I’ve seen a lot of Ansel Adams photographs over the years – but these were new to me. There so different from his usual Yosemite work but very “musical” in some sense. There’s a certain calligraphic look in all of these images – pen strokes that vary in width. Others might see other things – finger patterns in the frost on glass in the wintertime, etc.

Categories
Black and White Monochrome Photography Photography Photography - Black & White Stanford

Ansel Adams and Edward Weston at the Cantor

Weston by Ansel Adams -— Adams by Edward Weston

Currently there’s an exhibition of over thirty prints by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. Yesterday I stopped in for a docent tour of the show and enjoyed seeing their prints with Carol’s accompanying commentary.

She started with the two images above. On the left is Edward Weston taken by Ansel Adams. On the right is Ansel Adams taken by Edward Weston. In the exhibition the Weston prints are smaller – 8×10 contact prints in white frames and unsigned on the front while the Adams prints are signed and framed in black. A nice contrast.

The current exhibition draws from the Capital Group Foundation’s gift of 1,000 photographs to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University that includes works by American photographic masters Ansel Adams, Edward Curtis, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, Gordon Parks, and Edward Weston.