What MP's Consuming | September 2024

In this section, our team selects the one interesting and/or insightful thing they’ve consumed over the past month. These are not recommendations per se (though they can be), but rather stuff that we’ve consumed that have expanded our thinking and consider worth sharing. We hope these can help with your thinking too.

Hanyue(Amy) Ouyang : Scaling China's Green Energy Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges and Prospects

This study focuses on China’s green energy investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, which are interestingly biased toward hydropower at the expense of wind and solar. While Chinese investments still mainly take the form of government-to-government deals, this report posits that such a model will change going forward. It appears that Chinese companies are going to get more directly involved in African companies, including buying stakes in them. What that direct company-to-company relationship will herald in the broader China-Africa relationship is anyone’s guess, but at a minimum, it probably makes the African market an even bigger strategic priority for Beijing.

Johanna Costigan : Shell Game

The host of this six-part podcast created and tested an AI-generated voice agent—in an effort to pinpoint its precise current capabilities—so you don’t have to. He directs his homemade AI agent to call customer services agents, therapists, and his friends. The listener is a fly on the wall for a collection of conversations between AI and humans and between AI and itself (or himself?).?

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Best,

Team MacroPolo