QTRS May 29, 2025

Graphs, commentary, and interesting content for the curious

As I see it…

Conversations about the impact of AI on education and society are all the rage, as they should be. Here is the best set of bullet points I’ve seen, which comes from Jeff Selingo’s State of Higher Education 2025 report.

• GenAI is automating many tasks assigned to entry-level employees—like coding, content creation, and data review—raising employer expectations for productivity and AI fluency while reducing demand for early-career roles.

• While AI may narrow the skills gap by making digital tasks more accessible, it widens the experience gap, as employers increasingly prioritize demonstrated ability to apply those skills—a challenge for new grads lacking real-world exposure.

• As AI handles repetitive tasks, entry-level positions will require higher-level thinking, judgment, and domain expertise.

As I see it, a quote about the internet—“It makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber”—also applies to AI. The single main theme conveyed by the three bullet points above is the necessity to acquire knowledge and skills at a faster pace than previously. There will be less need for people doing entry-level work, and to be gainfully employed, you will need “higher-level thinking, judgment, and domain expertise.”

Smart people (defined broadly as those with higher levels of cognitive ability, motivation, and executive functions) will be able to make this jump over entry-level work. Others will use AI to pass classes in college and not only not be able to make this jump, they won’t even have acquired basic skills, as AI did it all for them, leaving them worse off. This scenario is likely to create a bigger gap in earnings between those that got smarter with AI and those that didn’t.

An analogy that seems fitting is that of a paralegal. A highly skilled paralegal, who likely has the capability to be a lawyer, can accomplish significantly more work by using AI to draft briefs that they subsequently edit and review. There is now much less of a need for a mediocre paralegal. The good paralegal still needs to know everything from before AI, as they need to know whether AI is hallucinating or not, the “domain expertise,” but they also need to be able to process more briefs at a faster pace with “higher-level thinking” and “judgment.”

This is going to continue to create challenges for higher education, which doesn’t like to change, to provide the value for students so that they can fill seats and stay open.

I’d love to hear comments about how AI is affecting your workplace.

Let’s go to some data to improve our domain knowledge in, well, everything.

Still more oil

The eia predicts that oil consumption growth will slow in 2025 and 2026, but the growth is still positive, and it has little to do with green energy and more to do with slowing economies. This is a great graph from the eia that shows the connection between GDP growth and oil consumption growth. I’ll keep saying it; the world will burn all the fossil fuels it can, and the planet will continue to warm.

It’s all about ENSO

Almost two years ago I wrote The three trends of climate change (6/8/2023), and six months after that I wrote an article, A Response to a NYT Climate Article (10/14/2023), where I pointed out that nothing surprising was happening with the record global temperatures at the time. Now this month we have the article Record Warmth of 2023 and 2024 was Highly Predictable and Resulted From ENSO Transition and Northern Hemisphere Absorbed Shortwave Anomalies (5/13/2025) in Geophysical Research Letters. Yes, the record warming last year was predictable, and ENSO was a big part of that. Just remember that you heard it here first (a bit tongue-in-cheek).

I think it is important that science fully understand and be able to account for every degree of warming, but when it comes to helping the public understand issues, it is ok to lose a little precision to simplify the overall idea. For climate change, you get the big picture from this graph I update every month in QTRS.

The key here is that warming is not linear; it is quadratic, and El Niño months are warming faster than neutral and La Niña months. Unless we stop burning fossil fuels, which, as you see from above, is unlikely, then we can expect these trends to continue. The next El Niño period will be hot. It is just difficult to predict exactly when that will happen, but within 5 years, give or take a year or two. When it happens, the media will act all surprised. You won’t be.

Which country has the highest GDP per capita?

This comes from Rise of the City-State: Is the Future Micro? in the World Population Review newsletter.

From the same newsletter, which country has the highest exports per capita? You’ll have to click the link to find out.

Graph of the week

This is from the paper How some tropical trees benefit from being struck by lightning: evidence for Dipteryx oleifera and other large-statured trees. (2/7/2025) The short version is that some trees can take a lightning hit while others can’t, helping them outcompete other trees. Here are the key points from the summary and this week's graph:

Data center update

PG&E sees data center power demand soar to 8.7GW (5/28/2025).

The Californian utility reported that it expects new data centers to require around 8.7GW of power over the next ten years. This represents a marked increase from the end of 2024, where the utility projected that it would require 5.5GW of electricity.

The spinning CD

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Please let me know if you believe I expressed something incorrectly or misinterpreted the data. I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than be correct. I welcome comments and disagreement. Please feel free to share article ideas, feedback, or any other thoughts at briefedbydata@substack.com.

Bio

I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD in Math: Stochastic Processes, MS in Applied Statistics, MS in Math, BS in Math, BS in Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations. I welcome any collaborations.