The Barbican in Winter

For a special friend who happens to live there.

Quote of the Day

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

• Louis Brandeis

Which is why I fear that the days of our ‘liberal’ democracy may be numbered.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Desmond | “Take Five” | arranged for solo guitar by Lucas Brar.

Link

Interesting comparison with the Dave Brubeck version.

Thanks to Brian for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

 The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence

A fabulous Daedalus essay by Erik Brynjolfssen on the looming decision that AI poses for democracy: automation or augmentation: doing away with workers, or making them more productive by augmenting them with technology. This is the best and most readable exposition of the problem/challenge that I’ve seen.

Here’s the overview:

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed an “imitation game” as the ultimate test of whether a machine was intelligent: could a machine imitate a human so well that its answers to questions are indistinguishable from those of a human.1 Ever since, creating intelligence that matches human intelligence has implicitly or explicitly been the goal of thousands of researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs. The benefits of human-like artificial intelligence (HLAI) include soaring productivity, increased leisure, and perhaps most profoundly, a better understanding of our own minds.

But not all types of AI are human-like—in fact, many of the most powerful systems are very different from humans —and an excessive focus on developing and deploying HLAI can lead us into a trap. As machines become better substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology. In contrast, when AI is focused on augmenting humans rather than mimicking them, then humans retain the power to insist on a share of the value created. What’s more, augmentation creates new capabilities and new products and services, ultimately generating far more value than merely human-like AI. While both types of AI can be enormously beneficial, there are currently excess incentives for automation rather than augmentation among technologists, business executives, and policymakers…

Do read it.

Books, etc.

What a legendary historian tells us about the contempt for today’s working class

Nice tribute to the late E.P. Thompson by Kenan Malik in Sunday’s Observer.

It is not often that, as a teenager, you get captured by a 900-page tome (unless it has “Harry Potter” in the title). Even less when it is a dense book of history, telling in meticulous detail stories of 18th-century weavers and colliers, shoemakers and shipwrights.

Yet I can even now picture myself first stumbling across EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in a bookshop. I had no idea about its cultural significance or its place in historiographic debates. I would not have known what “historiography” meant, or even that such a thing existed. But I can still sense the thrill in opening the book and reading in the first paragraph: “The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” I did not know it was possible to write about history in that way.

I still have that old, battered, pencil-marked Pelican edition with George Walker’s engraving of a Yorkshire miner on the cover; a book into which I continue to dip, for the sheer pleasure of Thompson’s prose and because every reading provides a fresh insight.

Were Thompson still alive, he would have been 100 on Saturday…

It’s a lovely piece, which rang lots of bells for me. Like Malik, as a teenager I first encountered Thompson’s book in the Pelican edition. For years my dog-eared copy followed me through various house moves, until tragically, it fell by the wayside somewhere.

Another book of his — Writing by Candlelight — was also a consolation as well as a delight to anyone living in the UK in the 1970s. It was a collection of incendiary essays written during that period, a miserable era in British history. Those essays, he wrote in the prologue,

generally arose unbidden and without premeditation, because ‘events’ seemed to say that something should be said. This something was generally intended to controvert, and if possible to discomfort the purveyors of received wisdom, and to contest the official descriptions of reality presented in the media.

As far as The Making of the English Working Class is concerned, Malik observes that its most celebrated line is Thompson’s avowal

“to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan” from the “enormous condescension of posterity”. What he meant was that from our vantage point, a movement such as the Luddites, textile workers who, in the early 19th century, opposed the introduction of new machinery, and destroyed them, might seem backward and irrational, their very name a byword for senseless opposition to technological innovation. Yet theirs was not, in Thompson’s eyes, “blind opposition to machinery,” but rather a fight against the “‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by… beating-down wages”.

Oddly enough, as we ponder our current anxieties about the possible impact of ‘AI’ on work and on society, this acquires a contemporary resonance.

Thompson’s parents, Wikipedia reminds us, were Methodist missionaries and his father was an admirer of the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Thompson’s childhood home seems to have been like Waterloo station for visiting Indian radicals, so much so that he grew up thinking that “nobody could be thought of as a serious person unless he had been incarcerated by the British”.

My commonplace booklet

Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’

From CNN:

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone he saw was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

Which makes it strange that some people still believe that the dangers of deepfakes are over-exaggerated.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Quentin’s photo of a Sanderling on Holkham beach. This is both beautiful and annoying, because I have been trying — and failing — for years to photograph these energetic little creatures, who move so quickly along edges of the incoming tide that they appear to be on wheels rather than on legs. So congrats to Quentin.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Beached?

The Law Faculty building at Cambridge. Always reminds me of a beached cruise liner. It’s named after my late friend and mentor, David Williams and was designed by — yes, you guessed it! — Norman Foster.

Quote of the Day

”It’s starting to feel like the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions.”

• Dan Wang

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Shake Rattle and Roll

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this is on.

Long Read of the Day

Dan Wang’s 2023 Long Letter

Dan is the most perceptive China-watcher I’ve read, and every January he produces a ‘Long Letter’ in which he reflects on the year just past. I’ve been reading them for some years, and they have always been informative, interesting and beautifully written.

This, the latest one is no exception.

Sample:

The most important story of China in 2023 might be that the expected good news of economic recovery didn’t materialize, when the end of zero-Covid should have lifted consumer spirits; and that the unexpected bad news of political uncertainty kept cropping up, though the previous year’s party congress should have consolidated regime stability. China may have hit its GDP growth target of 5 percent this year, but its main stock index has fallen -17% since the start of 2023. More perplexing were the politics. 2023 was a year of disappearing ministers, disappearing generals, disappearing entrepreneurs, disappearing economic data, and disappearing business for the firms that have counted on blistering economic growth.

No wonder that so many Chinese are now talking about rùn. Chinese youths have in recent years appropriated this word in its English meaning to express a desire to flee. For a while, rùn was a way to avoid the work culture of the big cities or the family expectations that are especially hard for Chinese women. Over the three years of zero-Covid, after the state enforced protracted lockdowns, rùn evolved to mean emigrating from China altogether.

One of the most incredible trends I’ve been watching this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the US-Mexico border. In January, US officers encountered around 1000 Chinese at the southwest border; the numbers kept rising, and by November they encountered nearly 5000.

Many Chinese are flying to Ecuador, where they have visa-free access, so that they can take the perilous road through the Darién Gap…

It’s the kind of stuff you don’t find in the Economist or Foreign Affairs. Worth your time.

Books, etc.

Very Ordinary Men 

Sam Kriss in The Point gives a masterclass in how to take a biographer apart. In this case the specimen on the slab is Walter Isaacson, whose most recent project was a biography of Musk.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America” — Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous…

And he hasn’t got to the Musk book yet.

My commonplace booklet

No, multimodal ChatGPT is not going to “trivially” solve Generative AI’s copyright problems

Gary Marcus is having none of Arvind Narayanan’s and Sayash Kapoor’s argument that “output similarity” —the inconvenient fact that Generative AIs sometimes produce near-exact copies of copyrighted material (whether they be graphics or stories in the New York Times) — is “easily fixable”. I’m with him on that. Interesting because Narayanan and Kapoor run a pretty sceptical and well-informed commentary on this stuff. But then, even Homer nodded sometimes.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• As you may have gathered, I don’t much like the elite gabfest that is the World Economic Forum held every January in Davos. So it’s annoying to have to report the that this video of a conversation between a number of tech experts on “The Expanding Universe of Generative Models” is rather good. So good in fact that it warranted 45 minutes of my attention. What’s particularly interesting is what Jann LeCunn said about the learning capacities of young children. If you’re pushed for time, his remarks on that topic start at 7.50.

Feedback

John Seeley thinks I’ve been a bit hard on the selfie-obsessed rats.

A word on behalf of the rats …

Though I liked your linkage of people, Skinner boxes and Meta etc, I want to indicate that the rats were involved in the life-serious food-and-survival quest. Why waste rat time gnawing through a plastic tower, a camera or cables when some guy is providing sugar for very little effort?

Touché. On the other hand, the ‘sugar’ in the human case is dopamine!

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Not a post office scandal

Merely a New Year knitted top for a postbox in Ely!

Quote of the Day

”Life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

• Søren Kierkegaard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four Last Songs, TrV 296 – 4. Im Abendrot | Jessye Norman

Link

I love this. The songs were composed in 1948, when Strauss was 84, and premiered at the Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Furtwängler.

Long Read of the Day

AI rights and human harms

Terrifically sharp essay by Helen Beetham (Whom God Preserve), a writer who takes no prisoners.

A possible captive in this context is Jeff Jarvis, a distinguished journalist and academic (and author of an interesting book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which I’ve read and enjoyed). When generative AI arrived on the scene, Jeff was excited about its possibilities for journalism and penned an essay cautioning us against imposing unreasonable restrictions on the training of LLMs (Large Language Models) like CPT-4 et al.

His piece included the following stirring paragraph:

To this day, journalists — whether on radio or at The New York Times — read, learn from, and repurpose facts and knowledge gained from the work of fellow journalists. Without that assured freedom, newspapers and news on television and radio and online could not function. The real question at hand is whether artificial intelligence should have the same right that journalists and we all have: the right to read, the right to learn, the right to use information once known. If it is deprived of such rights, what might we lose?

That last, rhetorical, question is what irked Helen. “Whose rights are really at risk?” she asks

Who or what is being ‘deprived’ of development? If we read closely, it is not the models at all, but ‘we’ who will ‘lose out’ if AI is not allowed to ‘learn’. This is not a coherent moral position. If models have rights, it can only be on their own behalf: their rights must relate to their own needs and purposes and vulnerability to ‘loss’, not to anyone else’s.

So what passes for moral philosophy in Silicon Valley really amounts to this: let big tech get on with doing big tech, without annoyances like legal frameworks and workers rights. The very last thing these corporations want is a new class of entities with rights they might have to worry about. They don’t want to give up valuable server space to failed or defunct models just because they ‘learned’ or once passed some spurious test of ‘sentience’: they want to decommission the heck out of them and make way for something more profitable. That is hardly a rights-respecting relationship. No, the models that big tech really cares about are business models and the thing they want to be accorded more rights, power and agency is the business itself.

Warming to her task, she exhumes an essay in a special issue of Robotics and AI about whether robots should have moral standing. “The essay,” she writes,

uses the examples of ‘servants’, ‘slaves’ and ‘animals’ to argue that what matters is how ‘virtuously’ the ‘owner’ behaves towards those in his power. The lived experience of slavery does briefly appear – so props to the author for realising that there might be an issue here – but in the end only to lament that the robot-slave metaphor is ‘limited’ by the unhappy particulars. Not that the ‘virtuous slave owner’ is a problematic moral guide. Not that human slavery should conscientiously be avoided as a metaphor for something else, such as the rights of non-human machines.

You are free to use the metaphors you choose, guys, but your choices betray your perspective. And in all these cases, the perspective is from someone with power. The power to choose, the power to behave nicely, or not so nicely, towards other people, women, servants, slaves, animals, chatbots, substrates. What these choices give away is a complete lack of understanding of the agency, the consciousness, the realities and perspectives and struggles of other people. The puzzle you can see lurking behind these examples is: where did all these rights of non-white non-guys come from? And the answer: it can only have been from the enlightened virtue of the white guys in charge. They decided that women deserved the vote, that slaves should be free. And in exactly the same way, they can decide to endow rights, privileges, consciousness even, to things they have created from their own incredible brains.

There’s lots more in that vein, which makes for a striking, exhilarating read.

My commonplace booklet

 Our Rodent Selfies, Ourselves

From the New York Times…

A photographer trained two rats to take photographs of themselves. Guess what: They didn’t want to stop.

(Instagram and TikTok users, look away now.)

Augustine Lignier, a professional photographer, began to wonder why so many humans feel compelled to photograph their lives and share those images online.

So he built his own version of a Skinner box — a tall, transparent tower with an attached camera — and released two pet-store rats inside. Whenever the rats pressed the button inside the box, they got a small dose of sugar and the camera snapped their photo. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a screen, where the rats could see them. (“But honestly I don’t think they understood it,” Mr. Lignier said.)

Do read it. And reflect. We are the rats in the Skinner boxes devised by Meta, ByteDance, Google & Co. But at least Mr Lignier’s rodents, unlike us, didn’t have better things to do with their lives. We, on the other hand, do. Go figure.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Machine-learning (‘AI’) is coming for your signature. Link

Just as well we’ve stopped writing cheques.

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Days like this

Just an ordinary picture, taken on an ordinary winter Saturday afternoon. I was sitting after lunch brooding on the Financial Times’s coverage of the Post Office scandal (about which I had written the next day’s Observer column), and listening to Van Morrison singing ‘Days Like This’, when suddenly the light changed and I saw the table — cluttered with (among other things) newspapers, a copy of Seamus Heaney’s letters that I’d been reading, a vase of tulips, a significant number of pots of newly-made marmalade — in a different light. And because one of the great things about smartphones is that one always has a camera to hand, I snapped it. And then thought that we rarely take such pictures. Generally we take photographs because something (or someone) is going on. But at this particular moment, nothing was happening. And yet it was a special moment.

Quote of the Day

”Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me”

• Dylan Thomas

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Inside Story of Josef Koudelka’s Career

Josef Koudelka is IMO the greatest living photographer, so it’s great to learn that Aperture has published a ‘visual biography’ of him, written by Melissa Harris with his full cooperation.

This is the transcript of a terrific interview of Harris that Lesley A. Martin has done.

Here’s how it starts:

Martin: How do you prepare to take a project like this, in which you have to understand the entirety of a life—or at least try to? What is the process of research?

Harris: We just started talking. I wasn’t really sure where to start with him, and so I thought I would start personally. He really did not know what he’d gotten himself into. It was brutal, our first meeting: Nobody was unpleasant or anything, but it was just really hard for him to talk about his parents or to talk about certain things about his childhood. Not because he had bad relationships or had been unhappy, but because he is very private, and in his own way, quite shy. At the start, it was mostly about figuring out the pacing and just going slowly, letting him formulate responses to questions he hadn’t been asked before or that he had stealthily evaded…

It’s fascinating from beginning to end. And it has a few of his most famous images strewn through it.

I’ve been thinking about his work for a while recently, because I’ve gone back to black-and-white photography, and discovered that, after years of shooting in colour, one has to re-learn how to do it. Photographers like Koudelka are inspiring because they demonstrate how powerful monochrome can be. It’s a completely different medium.

And I’ve ordered the book.

If the Horizon Post Office story is treated as a scandal, nothing will change

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The key question raised by the Horizon story is whether it’s a scandal or a crisis. Why is that important? Simply this: although scandals generate controversy, shock, anguish and anger, they don’t result in significant change. After a while, the public becomes bored, the media caravan moves on – to the next story, the next scandal; politicians piously declare that “lessons have been learned” (though heads rarely roll), and so on. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to systemic change, at least in working democracies. Laws change, institutions are closed or radically reformed, culprits go to jail… life does not go on as before.

There’s no question that the Post Office’s inhumane treatment of sub-postmasters constituted an egregious scandal. And initially there were indications that it might actually have become a crisis. Just a week after Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired on ITV, for example, the prime minister announced that the government would be introducing a new law to quickly exonerate and compensate the victims of “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.

A whole new law, eh? Maybe this scandal is a crisis after all. Not so fast. Although we don’t know the detail yet, it will just be a piece of legislation to right a specific wrong – a bit like the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, say. But it will do nothing about the systemic problems that led to the mistakes and injustices in the first place…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

An interesting question

Willard McCarty is one of the most thoughtful and scholarly people I know. He’s also annoying (for me) because he seems to have read everything . He’s the Editor of the Humanist daily newsletter (to which I’m a devoted subscriber), and he has a nice habit of lobbing hard questions into the community which often trigger interesting epistolary debates.

On Friday last, this is what he asked:

For the purposes of argument, let’s put aside whether Sigmund Freud’s theories of mind are correct or the latest word on the psyche. Let’s ask instead whether the great influence they have had and continue to have tells us something important about how we construe mind. For some of the world’s inhabitants (e.g. at least some indigenous Amazonians) the idea of ‘the unconscious’ (a black-box mind) makes no sense whatever. To paraphrase a forthcoming paper, everyone in a specific tribe knows what’s going on in another person’s mind; what they have no access to is what this person’s unknowable relations with other humans and with non-human others will lead him or her to do.

The question I want to ask is this: what do we do on discovering people who think in radically different ways than we do? Would not the best response be to question our possibly quite provincial assumptions about mind?

Why is this significant for those interested in computing? For one thing, taking radical diversity in the exercise of intelligence just might sensitise us to the anomalies of the artificial kind, and suggest that its failures to perform as expected just might open a window on emergent radical diversity in smart machines.

Needless to say, this has led me (and no doubt others) into exploring numerous rabbit-holes. Two I’ve been down already are Samuel Hammond’s essay “Where is all this heading? and Sam Altman’s “The Merge”. What I’ve learned so far is that I’m out of my depth.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

UK parcel firm disables AI after poetic bot goes rogue

From Reuters…

A dissatisfied customer of DPD tricked its ‘customer service’ chatbot into writing a poem about how bad it was. This is how it went…

There once was a chatbot named DPD,
Who was useless at providing help.
It could not track parcels,
Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time,
And a customer’s worst nightmare.
It was so bad,
That people would rather call the depot directly,
Than deal with the useless chatbot…

You get the idea. Not a promising poet. But DPD pulled its plug nevertheless.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Cobwebbed

Well, it is cold around here just now.

Quote of the Day

”The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”

• André Gide

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sony Terry & Brownie McGee | Bring it on home to me

Link

Decades ago, I heard them play in the Cambridge Guildhall. The kind of evening one never forgets.

Long Read of the Day

 Davos duplicity

This is the week of the nauseating annual gabfest in Switzerland, in which powerful elites gather to smooch and do virtue-signalling. It’s mostly pass-the-sickbag stuff, but this year’s edition is really OTT: the ‘theme’ is “Rebuilding Trust”, which is beyond satire, given that most of the big US corporations are there.

Robert Reich’s blog post nails it. These titans have been confessing, apparently, how worried they are that Trump will be re-elected.

“Yet”, observes Reich,

”many of them are fueling Trump and political upheaval in America by continuing to bankroll the 147 members of Congress who refused to certify Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021.

Recall that after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol, a cavalcade of big corporations announced with great fanfare that they had stopped making political contributions to these 147.

Since then, most have resumed campaign donations to them — thereby helping the deniers get reelected and threatening the stability of American democracy.

All told, at least 228 of America’s biggest (Fortune 500) corporations — representing more than two-thirds of some 300 companies with political action committees — have given $26.3 million to election deniers during the 2021-2024 election cycles…

Do read it. But check your blood-pressure first.

My commonplace booklet

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

What, you didn’t know the CIA had a creative writing group? Me neither. Not the propaganda department, either; ‘Real’ creative writing. But first you have to negotiate the parking problems at Langley.

Fabulous essay by Johannes Lichtman in The Paris Review.

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.” Read on.

It gets better. Nice to know that the fate of Western civilisation is in the hands of these guys.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How is AI education going to work?. In two different ways, according to Tyler Cowen.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

This is how you do it

Trinity Street, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”I love criticism so long as it is unqualified praise.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp – Royal Street I

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Case for Trump … by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose

A really interesting column by Bret Stephens, a columnist on the New York Times. It’s significant because it comes after a day that confirms that Trump will be the Republican candidate for President. The piece makes for uncomfortable reading — mostly because it makes one contemplate the mote in one’s own (liberal) eye.

You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable. Too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal — and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College. Since I will spend the coming year strenuously opposing his candidacy, let me here make the best case for Trump that I can…

If I had to sum up the argument, I’d say it was this. Trump is unquestionably a monster (a point upon which even many of his supporters may conceivably agree). So we need to look at why some many Americans seem willing to overlook his loathsomeness. In a nutshell, my hunch is that it’s because the kind of democracy that our neoliberalist ruling elites have carefully curated and venerated hasn’t been much good for many of them. And so they may be less troubled than we privileged elites are by the thought that Trump might be the wrecking ball that will blow up the whole wicked system. To adapt the the old joke — “What has posterity ever done for me?” — Trump voters may be asking “What has this neoliberal democracy ever done for me?” Of course they should be careful what they wish for for. But still…

The hard truth about AI? It might produce some better software** 

Sunday’s Observer column:

In its Christmas issue, the Economist carried an instructive article entitled “A short history of tractors in English” (itself an understated tribute to Marina Lewycka’s hilarious 2005 novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian). The article set out to explain “what the tractor and the horse tell you about generative AI”. The lesson was that while tractors go back a long way, it took aeons before they transformed agriculture. Three reasons for that: early versions were less useful than their backers believed; adoption of them required changes in labour markets; and farms needed to reform themselves to use them.

History suggests, therefore, that whatever transformations the AI hype merchants are predicting, they’ll be slower coming than they expect.

There is, however, one possible exception to this rule: computer programming, or the business of writing software…

Read on

Books, etc.

Just downloaded this, after strong recommendation by a friend with good judgement. Entrancing title, ne c’est pas?

My commonplace booklet

If you want to understand how difficult cybersecurity is, read this.

New iPhone Exploit Uses Four Zero-Days.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Mute inglorious Miltons

Lovely meditation by John Quiggin on those who worry about ‘peak population’.

I’m going to start with a claim that came up in discussion here and is raised pretty often. The claim is that the more children are born, the greater the chance that some of them will be Mozarts, Einsteins, or Mandelas who will contribute greatly to human advancement. My response was pre-figured hundreds of years ago by Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Gray reflects that those buried in the churchyard may include some “mute inglorious Milton” whose poetic genius was never given the chance to flower because of poverty and unremitting labour

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

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