Burren View

One of my favourite photographs. It’s taken from the northern shore of Galway Bay looking south to the ‘moonscape’ of the Burren in Co Clare.

Quote of the Day

”The English hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors; and in Brendan Behan’s tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless, and spoiling for a fight. In itself, of course, this is scarcely amazing. It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness”.

• Ken Tynan, reviewing Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow in the Observer.

As an Irishman, I couldn’t possibly comment.

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Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dolly Parton | Jolene | Glastonbury 2014

Link

Long Read of the Day

Here’s how we’re all going to die

This essay by Noah Smith presents the first credible scenario I’ve seen for how AI could pose a real existential risk to our species. For that reason, it’s not an enjoyable read. But it’s an important one. So take a deep breath and proceed.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written this scenario out. But in the months since I started describing it to people, I have yet to hear an even halfway-convincing argument as to why this scenario is far-fetched. Nor do I feel like I’m a habitual “doomer” or hysterical person; in fact, this scenario is the first apocalyptic vision I’ve ever found plausible. I don’t even think a nuclear war would bring down civilization at this point,1 but I think a vibe-coded supervirus definitely could.

Furthermore, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, I am actually fairly calm about most AI risks, including the ones that often get thrown around in discussions. But not this one. Off the top of my head, I’d give AI-enabled bioterror about a 10% chance of bringing down civilization, and about a 30% chance of causing truly world-changing levels of destruction.

If you’re thinking about how to save the world, this scenario — and others similar to it — are probably what you should be focusing on…

Goodbye Dolly

A remarkable woman passed away last week. Dolly Parton was wonderfully sassy, generous and outrageously talented. And she connected with people everywhere she went. One day in 1990, for example, she turned up at Paidí O’Shea’s pub in Ventry, Co Kerry and, well, you can guess what happened.

Link

My hunch is that she had few enemies (an odd thing in show business). Once when Terry Wogan, a late — and much lamented —Irish media star, was asked — in a conversation about reincarnation — who or what would he like to come back as, replied, without missing a beat, “Dolly Parton’s accordion”. She might not have been entirely happy with that. After all, one of her “pet peeves” was that “Nobody notices I’ve got a great ass too.” May she rest in peace.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

John Ratcliffe, the current Director of the CIA director recently went to Moscow on a mysterious mission which is believed to involve briefing his Russian counterpart on Washington’s bleak assessment of Russia’s position.

The private message that Ratcliffe delivered to Bortnikov about Ukraine echoed some of the director’s public statements.

Last month, Ratcliffe spoke out pointedly about Russian troop losses during the war, and Moscow’s inability to advance on the battlefield. He noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front lines was less than 35 minutes.

Can that figure of 35 minutes be right? If it is, then being a Russian soldier in Ukraine is like being a British Private going over the top in the battle of the Somme.

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Gold Coast

Where we’re headed this weekend.

Quote of the Day

”Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Grateful Dead | Brokedown Palace (Live at Carter-Finley Stadium; Raleigh

Link

Long Read of the Day

Silicon Valley’s long free ride is coming to an end. Tech companies are now increasingly unpopular with both the public and juries — which is why the other day Meta agreed to pay up to roughly US$18 billion, plus make major design changes to Facebook and Instagram, as part of a settlement it has agreed to in its most recent lawsuit about engineering teenage addiction into its products and services.

What’s even more dramatic is the rising public hostility — in the US and elsewhere — to AI and to data-centres in particular. I’d been looking for a good write-up on this and now Brian Merchant has provided it in this Substack post.

Americans overwhelmingly hate data centers. They overwhelmingly dislike Flock surveillance cameras. And now it seems they overwhelmingly despise Meta’s newest product, AI-infused Ray Bans that have been widely termed “pervert glasses,” too. Enveloping all of the above trends is a general, percolating dislike of Silicon Valley’s marquee pursuit, generative AI; a sentiment underscored, again, by a slate of recent polls.

It’s almost funny to think back to the mild wave of public consternation and Congressional wrist-slapping that pundits termed “the techlash” in the heady days of the first Trump administration, over concerns of disinformation on Facebook and social media, compared to what we’re seeing now. That is, a genuine, sustained demonstration of rage at some of the modern tech industry’s key aims.

And all of this has become so clear, so palpable, and so widespread that it’s apparently causing tech industry leadership and pro-AI policy wonks to enter either a state of denial or something more akin to fevered delusion.

Last week, in response to a fresh round of politicians announcing policies to slow or pause data center development, and the release of two new polls, including a Heatmap survey that found 75% of Americans would now oppose data centers being built where they live, AI industry players eschewed gestures towards contrition and essentially just melted down.

Some of the Valley’s responses include:

• The anti-data center movement is a ‘psy-op’ funded by the Chinese Communist Party or the product of “psychosis”
• Arguing that Silicon Valley shouldn’t need to defer to ordinary people on matters regarding technological development
• Claiming that the movement is propped up by paid shills backed by the “AI safety industrial complex”
• Claiming that opposing data center construction is inhumane because it amounted to genocidal population-control on soon-to-be sentient AIs.

I love the idea of the “AI safety industrial complex”!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Books, etc.

I was writing about AI and technocracy the other day and was suddenly reminded of a book that I read as a student in 1969 that had made a deep impression on me. Given the time-lapse it was unlikely that I still had it. But I went to my bookshelves and there it was! It’s about the ‘counter-culture’ of my student generation viewed as a revolt against the technocratic state, which has interesting resonances with the tech lash currently under way (and discussed by Brian Merchant on today’s Long Read above).

The Odyssey corner

Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, is not impressed by Nolan’s “Zero-Eros” Odyssey. Basically, she says, all the sex has been edited out.

Nolan’s nearly three-hour masterwork, the classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”

Yeah, and what about the serial infidelity which delayed the hero’s return for ten years?

Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.

One day I will have to watch the bloody thing. But first I have to buy a good pair of earplugs, if my friends are to be believed.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• The 2026 iPhone Photography Awards Link

Makes one wonder sometimes why we bother with traditional cameras.

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Poppy farming

A reminder of what the garden was like before the Great Drought.

Quote of the Day

”Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring | Leo Kottke

Link

I once heard him play this at the Cambridge Folk Festival. Magical moment.

Long Read of the Day

Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself?

Timothy Garton Ash fears not. Here’s his sombre reasoning

As a matter of fact, everyone from the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, to Pope Leo XIV has been weighing in on the opportunities and dangers of AI, and how to regulate it. Xi insists AI should be “always under human control” (and preferably that of the Chinese Communist party). Appealing explicitly to the “global south”, Beijing has inaugurated a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation. Meanwhile, the head of the world’s oldest and largest international NGO – the Roman Catholic church – discusses the AI challenge in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity). Either we will build a new tower of Babel, the pope argues, or we will follow the example of the Jewish leader Nehemiah, who got the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt by involving the whole community in the project.

But looking around the world today, I see more Netanyahus than Nehemiahs. With salutary realism, a paper from the British thinktank Chatham House argues that it will take a major crisis to catalyse global coordination of AI governance. Unfortunately, I think even that sober prognosis is too optimistic…

Books, etc.

This is the latest book by the Harvard historian, Jill Lepore. It’s just arrived and I’m looking forward to reading it.

The NYT has an early review of it.

My commonplace booklet

My Observer column on how AIs tend to revert to the average prompted this nice anecdote from John Seeley.

A number of years ago I was given the task of arranging the painting of a large laboratory. A number of people worked in the laboratory, though I did not. Seeking consensus, I thought the researchers should have input into the paint choices.

Several colour schemes were drawn up (I recall 6 or 8) and researchers voted on their preferences. “You’ll get magnolia,” said the savvy department manager. A small number of voting systems were used to evaluate the results. (What you get in an academic environment!). Without fail, all voting systems produced the result magnolia! People lived contentedly with the new paintwork – no love was expressed but people had successfully resisted anything even modestly avant-garde.

C’est la vie artificielle.

Chart of the day

CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. It’s basically a naming system for publicly-known computer security flaws. Note the near-vertical increase since the arrival of the Claude Mythos model on the scene.

Source

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Big Skies

A view of Brancaster beach that is almost painterly.

Quote of the Day

”Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.”

• John Maynard Keynes

(I think he also likened betting on the stock market to judging a beauty contest, except you were assessing not the beauty of the contestants, but the opinions of other judges of it.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss & Union Station | The Lucky One

Link

Long Read of the Day

We already live in ‘clone towns’ – AI is making things worse

My latest Observer column.

In 2004 the New Economics Foundation (NEF) conducted a national survey of UK high streets, which were then still economically active. It found that real local shops had been replaced by swathes of identikit chain stores, making high streets up and down the country virtually indistinguishable from one another. It also came up with a new vocabulary for talking about urban areas.

In this terminology, a “home town” is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A “clone town”, in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a “monochrome strip of global and national chains”. Which meant that its retail heart could easily be mistaken for dozens of other bland town centres across the country. Of the towns surveyed, the NEF concluded: 41% were clone towns, 33% were home towns and 26% were “border towns”, meaning somewhere in between.

This lack of diversity is not just confined to towns. It’s everywhere. You see it in property ads for new flats, or houses that have been modernised for resale. Kitchens like operating theatres (and upmarket ones with the obligatory island); sitting rooms featuring white settees with overstuffed cushions, polished wood flooring and oversized TVs. Or cafes with exposed brickwork, and an expectation that oat milk with flat whites and smashed avocado are what you want. Or the legion of young influencers on Instagram who seem increasingly undistinguishable.

What’s driving this, apparently inexorable, onward march to uniformity? Modern capitalism, certainly. And social media, obviously. But underpinning it all is a particular technology and philosophy that increasingly determines how corporations make investment decisions and consumers make choices.

The tech industry calls it AI but it’s really machine-learning. It’s software that tries to predict what you’re likely to want next – a song, a video, a product, a location, a flat, whatever – and then shows you it, based on patterns in your past behaviour (what you clicked, watched, bought or rated) and the online behaviour of people whom the machine thinks may be like you.

These machines are basically statistical guessers. They’re trained by being given an objective – a measure of the thing they’re supposed to maximise – and a loss function, which is essentially a penalty for making bad guesses. And, as the social data scientist Lauren Leek explains in a brilliant Substack post, Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same, it’s the loss function that drives these machines – and their unsuspecting users – to blandness.

This is because the most common loss function is the “squared error” one. It’s calculated by taking the difference between the machine’s guess and the right answer and multiplying it by itself. This means that it really punishes big discrepancies. Which, in turn, means that the machine’s algorithm always plays safe by predicting the average of all the available possibilities.

And in the process, it squashes ideas that were wild but also potentially original. As Leek writes: “The strange Georgian-Japanese street-food fusion restaurant nobody can classify … the song that sounds unlike what came before, most will never matter. But some will. A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely.”

Which brings us back to those identikit high streets. The NEF’s clone towns weren’t the product of some co-ordinated plan to homogenise Britain, but the emergent outcome of many thousands of separate independent decisions, each one taken in its own context. No government or corporation decided that every town needed the same clothing chain, coffee shop and supermarket outlet.

Leek’s insight is that, in an AI-driven world, mathematics can explain why something such as that keeps happening, at every scale, from the high street to the streaming platform: any system trained to minimise error will always retreat towards the average, because the average is the safest guess when you’re not quite sure.

My commonplace booklet

Terry Eagleton on T.S. Eliot

For most moderately enlightened readers today, Eliot’s social views range from the objectionable to the obnoxious. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), he portrays his ideal social order, which seems more rural than urban. There will be a culture of values and beliefs shared in common; but though society will thus constitute an organic unity, it will also be strictly stratified. There will be a governing elite, consisting of the traditional English rural class along with an intellectual coterie of men not entirely unlike Eliot himself.

The task of this elite is to protect and disseminate the (largely Christian) values of the society as a whole. It is a vital undertaking, since if Christianity were to founder the whole of Western civilization would collapse along with it. Yet since the mass of men and women are in Eliot’s view incapable of what might properly be called thinking, their participation in the culture will be less conscious than that of their superiors. Instead, it will take the form of custom and tradition, myth and sentiment, ritual observances and spontaneous habits of feeling. All individuals will share in the same form of life, but they will share in it in different ways and at different levels of consciousness. The organic and the hierarchical can thus be reconciled.

From The Pope of Russell Square.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How Did the English Build Such Beautiful Villages?. It’s a question I’ve often asked myself, coming as I do from a country that hasn’t been great at village-creation (partly for historical reasons). This is a fascinating article from Architecture and Tradition.

There is something immediately recognizable about an old English village, where a narrow lane winds between stone cottages, chimney pots rise above uneven roofs which can be repaired by roofers seattle, hedges spill across garden walls, and somewhere beyond the houses the tower of a medieval church appears through the trees, giving the whole settlement a center without dominating everything around it.

Feedback

Mention of ‘Professor Sisyphus’ in Friday’s edition made Nigel Kellaway think of this New Yorker cartoon.

Screenshot

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Mugshot

I was brooding about Keynes the other day (because of something I’m writing) and suddenly looked at the mug on my desk, and there he was, courtesy of a David Low cartoon in the New Statesman of 1932!

Quote of the Day

”The three great elements of modern civilisation: gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion.”

• Thomas Carlyle

Miserable bugger he was, too.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Like a Rolling Stone

Link

A truly wonderful song about hubris.

Long Read of the Day

‘Plastered Saint’

If you want a compellingly readable memoir in which the author paints a self-portrait ‘warts and all’ (as Cromwell memorably demanded of a portrait painter), then Terry Eagleton’s your man. And here is a fine example of him at his confessional best.

If you’re puzzled by the title, then you’ll just have to read on.

I got into Cambridge but stumbled through my time there sick at heart. I suppose I was unconsciously convinced that I had killed my father in order to climb to the top of the very social order that had blighted his life. I had deserted him in the hour of his death, almost literally stepping over his dead body into a world that would scarcely have understood the way he spoke. Those were the days when Oxbridge seemed populated exclusively by the improbably tall sons of aristocrats (there were hardly any women), the offspring of centuries of fine breeding, who sprawled rather than sat, neighed rather than laughed, and brayed rather than spoke. I walked among them like Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Mine was the classic legend of the scholarship boy, though with a peculiarly dark twist. The scholarship boy typically feels that he has betrayed his parents, not that he has done away with them. Was I glad that my father was dead, as well as distraught? Was his end necessary so that I might begin? When I became a don I was the youngest fellow of my college since the eighteenth century, an era to which some of my colleagues seemed anxious to return. I had set my foot on the escalator that was to bear me up and away from the speechless man I had left on his deathbed. Then I moved to Oxford, uncertain whether I should reject the place in my father’s name or embrace it for just the same reason.

There is always a convenient resolution in Oxbridge to human unhappiness, known as alcohol. The college cellars are stacked high with anesthetics, laid on in particular for those dons who lead lives of quiet desperation. By the age of forty I was, in the words of Brendan Behan, a drinker with a writing problem. Death gradually became less of an abstract possibility and more of an everyday reality. I was clearly en route to an early grave. I was not, however, quite as wedded to the bottle as one of my colleagues, an economist of rare brilliance who was able to make astonishingly complex arithmetical calculations in his head while too drunk to stand up, and who would chair with brisk efficiency a series of committees whose members must have appeared to him as no more than a faint blur on his eyeballs. He once told me that he could only teach on a hangover, and that after several years of intensive political arguments between us I had never once seen him sober. He had raised faking sobriety to a fine art. Like the tango, it gets harder as you get older.

There was, however, the odd lapse. One morning he was found lying spread-eagled unconscious in the quad, but the college wisely decided to let sleeping dons lie, while the tourists politely negotiated a path around his body and occasionally took photos of him, perhaps in the belief that he was as permanent a feature of the university as the Bodleian Library. Few people in those years spoke of mental health, and there was certainly no question of raising such issues amidst the suave chitchat of High Table. So I turned instead to friends and unburdened myself of my troubles to a small number of students, partly on the grounds that young people are the least morally censorious section of the population.

Sharing my woes with a few sympathetic students placed an emotional demand on them to which they were inevitably unequal, leaving them both embarrassed and alarmed. So after a while I stopped confiding in students and retreated into myself, never in my case the most reliable of refuges. I was ill for twenty years, while trying to teach and publish as best I could. One friend was sufficiently impressed by my befuddled devotion to duty to call me a plastered saint. I also continued to lecture abroad, only to discover that my overseas travels were considered by some to be politically motivated. I was rumored to be visiting various foreign capitals on behalf of the IRA, even though the organization was not generally thought to be so short-staffed or dimwitted as to use Oxford dons as secret agents. I also had a play touring Ireland at the time, which was regarded as perfect cover for paramilitary networking…

Read on.

Terry has had an extraordinary career. He was the Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and is the author of more than fifty books in the fields of literary theory, postmodernism, politics, ideology, and religion. This article has been excerpted from his latest book, A Death of One’s Own, which is coming out next week from Yale University Press. One thing I’d love to read is his MI5 file, but sadly it will not be publicly available until both he and I are long dead.

My commonplace booklet

From Heather Cox Richardson

There is also the uncomfortable fact that the national debt passed a record $40 trillion yesterday, much sooner than expected. The U.S. is currently spending more than a trillion dollars a year to pay interest on the national debt, more than it spends on defense.

And guess who those trillion dollars are going to? Robert Reich has an interesting answer to that question.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

 Professor Sisyphus Begins a New Semester by Talia Argondezzi

On the first day of the semester, Professor Sisyphus made a to-do list. As he completed items on the to-do list, he kept adding new ones at about twice the rate he crossed off items.

Professor Sisyphus graded the papers his students had submitted. The day he handed back the graded papers, the next paper was due.

Professor Sisyphus joined the committee that was drafting the new strategic plan. They held planning meetings. Then they held listening sessions. Then they drafted a draft strategic plan. Then they held feedback meetings on the draft strategic plan. Then they made revisions to the draft based on the draft strategic plan feedback meetings. On the day the administration released the new strategic plan, which didn’t reflect the committee’s work, they called for volunteers to form a committee to start drafting the next new strategic plan…

Sounds familiar? Me too. (I was once, briefly, the Head of my university Department.)

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Come on in

A hibiscus flower seen on an evening walk.

And a bee who accepted the invitation and covered itself in pollen!

Quote of the Day

”The political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty.”

• John Maynard Keynes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert | Impromptu No. 4, Op. 90 | Evgeny Kissin

Link

Long Read of the Day

Employment tribunals are being overworked by a surge in AI-aided claims

My latest Observer column:

‘How AI is breaking the British state” screamed a recent headline in the Economist, a magazine that traditionally prides itself on its sobriety. Citizens, it reports, are “turning to artificial intelligence to file objections and appeals, and claim their dues. The resulting deluge of complaints, and demands, will overwhelm bureaucracies built for the age of the post and the telephone. Too little is being done to prevent the state from drowning.”

So which part of the British state is grievously imperilled by this technology? Nothing less than the nationwide system of employment tribunals, the local courts that rule on disputes between employees and their employers. These courts are now apparently clogged with AI-generated cases. According to the magazine, the number of people filing claims against their employer rose by 39% in the year to March 2026, compared with the previous year, to 50,000, while the rate of cases being resolved or rejected fell.

The surge in cases has two obvious explanations. One is the vast scope of UK employment law. Until recently there were more than 100 grounds on which an employer could be sued, to which the new Employment Rights Act has now added about 25 more. From January next year, claims for unfair dismissal can be brought after six months’ employment rather than the two years that applied before. And, crucially, employment tribunals are more open to the public than other courts because anyone can lodge a complaint.

The other factor is the easy availability of AIs such as ChatGPT, Claude et al that can be employed to transform a complaint into a superficially impressive document. After all, these machines have “read” (that is, ingested) all the relevant legislation and are perfectly capable of covering drivel in three coats of prime legal verbiage. When the Economist’s researchers were experimenting with a fictional claimant who said they had been bullied for liking horoscopes, the machine pointed out that this is not yet a protected belief under discrimination law, but that veganism is!

This idea of using technology to deal with state or corporate bureaucracy is older than the Economist seems to realise. In 2015, Joshua Browder (pictured), a British lad studying at Stanford University, created DoNotPay, a free chatbot for contesting parking tickets by guiding users through a Q&A process to find loopholes or technicalities in them. The app was initially launched in London and then expanded to New York and Seattle. In 2016, Browder claimed that the DoNotPay had challenged more than 250,000 parking tickets in London and New York and won 160,000 of them, though that claim doesn’t seem to have been independently verified.

DoNotPay has had its ups and downs with US regulators over the years, but it’s still up and running, billing itself as an organisation that “utilises artificial intelligence to help consumers fight against large corporations and solve their problems, like beating parking tickets, appealing bank fees, and stopping robocallers”.

Employment tribunals were a radical innovation when they were introduced in the 1960s as a kind of “people’s court” to resolve disputes quickly and economically, with none of the procedural stuffiness of a normal court of law. There’s no fee to bring a case, no requirement to have legal representation and – unlike most civil cases – no obligation in the majority of cases to pay the opponent’s costs.

The Employment Rights Act was an admirable piece of legislation aimed at reducing insecure work, outlawing zero-hours contracts and other unscrupulous employment practices; in other words, redressing the chronic imbalances implicit in contemporary capitalism. What the drafters of the act clearly did not envisage, though, was that one of its unintended consequences might be the paralysis of the employment tribunal system – even though ChatGPT was already old hat when the bill became law.

And the key takeaways? Think systemically, and be careful what you wish for.

Books, etc.

 How To Read A Novel

Really interesting essay by Steven Johnson on what reading fiction does for us.

He argues that novels are

extensions of the human mind’s marvelous aptitude for building simulations of potential events. It’s something we do so effortlessly that we rarely stop to think about how nuanced a skill it really is: creatively projecting forward into our possible futures based on our previous experience of the world. Narratives of all sorts allow you to parachute into other simulated experiences, which ultimately give you more data for your own simulations. But novels, I would argue, give you the richest simulation of the interior life of other people’s experiences: you get a ringside view of all that emotional and cognitive action. This is particularly true of the novel after, say, 1750 or so, when the novelists began adopting more of the inner monologues (both first-person and “close-third” perspective) that Shakespeare had explored on the stage.

It seems fairly obvious to me that there is practical utility in running these simulations. We accumulate wisdom that we can apply to our own lives by watching other people live theirs…

This essay brought two uncomfortable thoughts to mine. One is that I don’t read enough fiction. The other is that I really need to read Middlemarch!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Economics in a single paragraph

Source

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Holy Smoke!

Nice juxtaposition on a Donegal beach.

Quote of the Day

”A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon | Graceland

Link

Triggered by a marvellous BBC Prom the other night

Long Read of the Day

 Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same

This a fabulous, insightful essay by Lauren Leek, a great data scientist, on a question that has puzzled me for ages: why do so many females with online followings seem to look alike? Ditto for ads for upmarket apartments. Ditto for city high streets. It puzzled Lauren too, but unlike me she found a way of explaining it.

I’ve spent most of the last decade unable to answer the simplest question anyone asks: where’s home? I’ve lived in multiple countries, with a passport situation that makes border guards frown. Now I’m moving again, to The Hague, and it was house-hunting that finally made me see it. Every flat I scrolled, in a city I barely know, I already recognised: the same refinished parquet, matte-black taps, rewilded pot plant on the same windowsill. Same with the café near every place I’ve lived, flat white and exposed brick and oat milk assumed. I’m at home everywhere because everywhere is converging on the same few templates, and I’m exactly who those templates were optimised for. The recommender’s algorithm’s ideal user, basically.

Here is what puzzled me. We have never had more individual data and naive intuition says all that granular personal data should fragment us, splinter the world into a billion niches. And yet the opposite is happening. The more the machines learn about us as individuals, the more alike our worlds look. That paradox, more personalisation producing more sameness, is what this piece is about, and by the end I want to convince you this is a political economy story that needs and has an easy intervention.

The theoretical mechanism

Imagine forty options, cuisines, genres, shop types, and a standard algorithm: predict what people want, show them more of it, watch what they pick, update. Then let the loop run…

Do read it. Well worth your time. And if you find it hard going in places, Cory Doctorow (Whom God Preserve) has a masterly exegesis of it.

Books, etc.

Machines are not the enemy

Diane Coyle’s review of Sarah O’Connor’s fine book.

Readers of Sarah’s articles in the Financial Times – the only newspaper worth reading regularly any more – will be aware that she (& fellow journalist John Burn-Murdoch) keep up heroically with the vast amount of academic work on AI and labour markets, so the book is very well-informed about those debates. Combining that with reportage brings the issues to life, but also raises questions the academic literature rarely surfaces.

The one that stands out in my mind is why on earth our societies and politicians are going along with the use of AI to dehumanise the humans, to make people work to the rhythm of the machines. Truck drivers have long and unhealthy shifts because of the requirements imposed by the tachygraphs that regulate driving hours – the maximum becomes the target – and the answer to their risk of dozing off in the cab is still more machines to monitor them. In warehouse jobs, as the AI gets faster, the demands on the people serving the logistic robots become more relentless.

The thing about Diane’s crisp reviews is that they invariably get to the nub of a book’s main idea.

My commonplace booklet

We’ve had an EV for five years, and during that time I’ve observed how public discourses about these vehicles has evolved. In the beginning it was usually about ‘range’ and it took me a while to realise that it wasn’t about ‘range anxiety’ at all, but infrastructure anxiety. If you drove a conventional (ICE) car you didn’t worry about range because you knew that wherever you were, there was going to be a petrol filling station within reach. The problem with EVs at the beginning was that infrastructure of ‘filling stations’ was sparse, unless you drove a Tesla which had, from the beginning built its own infrastructure of ‘superchargers’.

Another common element in the discourse concerned the time that it took to recharge an EV — which could take up to 20 or 30 minutes, compared with an ICE which you could top up in less than five minutes. Our experience over five years — and many long trips — has been that the longer charging time turns out to a feature rather than a bug, in the sense that it gives you a restful interval — and a respite — during a longer journey.

Errata

In Friday’s edition the link to Shane McGowan’s funeral was missing. Here it is. Apologies, and thanks to Kevin Cryan for pointing it out.

David Johnson noted the connection between Friday’s Long Read — about AI being useful for proofreading — and the spelling error in the edition’s footer (“Thank yoiu for reading this far.”) My response: at least it shows that I wrote it unaided by AI!

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Skydriver

I love this picture and often wondered if it was a fake. So I asked Claude to do some research.

Here’s what it found:

The photo is genuine, not a spoof or composite. It’s real — a real girder, real height, real people — but it was staged as a publicity stunt, not a candid snapshot.

It comes from a series of “sky-high pose” photos shot by Underwood & Underwood around 1932 during construction of the RKO Building (part of the Rockefeller Center complex) in Manhattan. The same photo agency and era produced the more famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” image, which Corbis’s own chief historian confirmed was arranged by Rockefeller Center’s PR team as a promotional stunt using real ironworkers, with several photographers on hand that day. The golfer photo fits the same mold: it’s often captioned “Playing golf in mid-air: Stunts” — Getty’s own catalog labels it a stunt shot, and it’s sometimes attributed to photographer Charles C. Ebbets, though attribution across this whole series is murky since multiple agency photographers covered the event.

Quote of the Day

”In the long run the stock market is a weighing machine, but in the short run it’s a voting machine.”

• Anon

Which we’re now beginning to see as stock markets try to assess whether (and how) tech giants will profit from their current trillion-dollar gambles on AI.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mo Ghile Mear | Cór Cúil Aodha

The funeral of Shane MacGowan, a much-loved Irish singer-songwriter, musician and poet who died in November 2023, was an extraordinary event. As his wicker coffin was leaving the packed church, the male voice choir of Cúil Aodha, an Irish-speaking area of County Cork, broke into an ancient Irish song whose origins go back to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 — Mo Ghile Mear — which translates as ‘My Gallant Darling’ or ‘My Brave Hero’.

Long Read of the Day

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

Sound advice  from Sophie Alpert for anyone who uses LLMs.

Good writing is a tool to clearly communicate ideas from your brain into someone else’s.

As of 2026, AI models — despite their coding ability — are not yet at a point where their unedited output will achieve this goal; you as an author need to take the time to make sure that all of the ideas in the writing are the ideas that you personally intend to convey (including the structure and wording that determines which ideas are emphasized) and that the documents are a good use of your readers’ time.

It’s allowed to use AI tools while brainstorming or drafting your writing and certainly while proofreading, but make sure to consider the following principles while doing so…

Read on. It’s worth it.

My Commonplace booklet

John McPhee: How to deal with writer’s block

What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother? And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the Dear Mother and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for reminding me of it.

Footnote: Secretariat was a thoroughbred racehorse, winner of U.S. Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing in 1973

Books, etc.

This just arrived and is, for me at least, a must-read as it tackles a question that many of us are struggling with at the moment. Comes out in the UK on August 20. He’s already had an interesting conversation with Tyler Cowen about it.

The Odyssey corner

One intriguing aspect of the discourse triggered by Christopher Nolan’s film is people searching for contemporary resonances of Homer’s epic and the cinematic rendering of it. Ezra Klein picked up on this the other day. So too does David French in an essay in the New York Times.

He starts with the way the Trojan horse violated the ‘golden rule’ of treating others as you wish to be treated yourself.

Is there a consequence for failing to love thy neighbor as thyself?

At this moment in American history it seems as if a substantial portion of America’s ruling class is putting all its chips on the answer being no, rules are for suckers. In fact, as far as they are concerned, morality causes problems. In American politics and commerce, complying with something as lame as “norms” — even uttering the word in a positive fashion — is like fighting with one hand tied behind your back.

A president enriches himself at a scale never seen before in the United States. An Epstein class of abusive libertines always seems to evade accountability for its crimes. Government officials break the law with impunity, banking on presidential pardons to excuse their crimes — all while truth is buried under an avalanche of lies, lies that are shared with gusto by cadres of grifters and fools.

French’s point is that “Without saying one word about modern politics, Christopher Nolan has rebuked the spirit of the age.”

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Ludwig’s ghost

Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. In a nice coincidence, Frank Ramsey, the young genius who, as a teenager, first translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is buried nearby.

Quote of the Day

”When you become famous, being famous becomes your profession.”

• James Carville

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Scott Joplin | Solace | performed by Phillip Dyson

Link

Not a piece I knew. Glad I found it.

Long Read of the Day

AI is destroying books to stop chatbots choking on their own slop

Last week’s Observer column.

Some months ago, online booksellers began to notice a dramatic uptick in business. Books published before 2022 were suddenly in demand. One seller interviewed by the 404 Media website went from selling maybe 20 books in a good week to suddenly selling hundreds. He was puzzled and slightly suspicious about this bonanza. The books he usually sold tended to be specialised and bought by schools and libraries. And his bulk orders in the past were inclined to reflect a sudden interest in a particular topic.

But the recent large orders were for books that had little in common except for one thing: they all had an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) – a unique publishing identifier. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” he said. “Also, there’s a total disregard for the price of the book. I’ve had some books that sold this way that were… greatly overpriced.”

Whoever was buying these books was clearly not price-sensitive. That’s because those deep-pocketed bibliophiles were an AI company. The most likely collector is Anthropic, which Wall Street thinks is closing in on a $1tn valuation and has form in the book-scanning business. Way back in 2024, it hired Tom Turvey, an executive who had been involved in the Google Books project, and put him in charge of “Project Panama” – a secret scheme to “destructively scan all the books in the world”. According to an internal document unsealed in a court case, the codename was chosen “because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this”.

So what is “destructive scanning”? Basically, it’s nasty, brutal and quick. It means cutting a book apart in order to digitise it. You slice off the spine or use a heated solvent to dissolve the book’s binding glue, and separate it into loose single sheets that are fed through a high-speed scanner or automatic document feeder. And, having done this, you pulp or otherwise dispose of the paper.

To anyone who cares about books, it may seem barbaric. After all – as the Google Books project showed – it’s possible to digitise books without destroying them. But that requires time and care, two things entirely absent from the tech mindset. Companies such as Anthropic are in a hurry and their appetite is gargantuan.

An internal memo on “data acquisition opportunity” dated October 2024 said that “We still have room to grow our investment in Project Panama. There are ~40 million books available to purchase in the world. Given our current purchase parameters mainly around price, publishing quality, confidentiality, our serviceable obtainable market (SOM) is $[redacted]M. To date we have purchased redactedM books leaving a sizable [redacted]M left.” (Note: “M” equals millions.)

What lies behind this appetite? Answer: the fear of “model collapse”. Large language models (LLMs) are trained by ingesting every machine-readable text available online. But as they become more ubiquitous, more and more of the text those chatbots generate is itself ending up back online. Which means that newer generations of LLMs will be trained on data that includes much of this AI-generated output.

In other words, the machines could eventually wind up inhaling their own exhaust. This is not a good idea, even for computers, as the late computer scientist Ross Anderson and his colleagues pointed out in 2023. Their study of “the curse of recursion” found that “use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models”.

Avoiding the curse means finding some impeccable, machine-readable text that is unsullied by AI slop. And what better source of such glorious training data than books published before the slop started spewing after the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.

Books, after all, are the prime example of accumulated knowledge packed into copy-edited, grammatical, lucid prose. They have, of course, one drawback: their lack of machine-readability. But to an engineer, that’s a mere technical problem. Books can be butchered and their valuable data scanned into the giant sausage machine of AI.

It’s a pity, obviously, that they have to be destroyed in the process. But then you can’t have a tech revolution without shattering some sentimental human illusions.

The Odyssey corner

The thing that fascinates me about the movie (which, Ironically, I haven’t seen) is the discourse around and about it that it has spawned. The next exhibit is Ezra Klein’s interesting take on it in the New York Times. It’s a 16-minute video but there’s also a transcript.

Klein’s main (and interesting) point is that Christopher Nolan has

smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into “The Odyssey.” Zeus’ law, in Nolan’s “Odyssey,” echoes Leviticus 19:34: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” It echoes Rabbi Hillel, who said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.” It echoes Matthew 7:12, when Jesus says, “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets.”

I asked Claude to explain the thinking behind this interpretation. Here’s how it responded:

Nolan’s Odysseus is a man living amid the wreckage tricksters have caused, forced to reckon with it. Klein argues we’re currently living through “an age of tricksters” (Musk, Trump, Tucker Carlson, etc.) — figures who gain power by transgressing norms and taboos. Nolan’s twist is smuggling Judeo-Christian ethics (the Golden Rule, “love the stranger as yourself”) into the film via “Zeus’s law,” which in the actual myth is a much narrower rule about hospitality, not compassion. That substitution is the film’s “trick”: it makes an old moral inheritance — reciprocity and compassion over domination — feel new and urgent again.

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Wistfulness

Quote of the Day

”War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

• Thomas Mann

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Alison Krauss | Down To The River To Pray

Link

Long Read of the Day

Threw away the boot

Lovely memoir by Dilip D’Souza

When I was younger, so much younger than today, family and friends began to notice that I stood a little awkwardly. Maybe I never needed anybody’s help in any way, I don’t know. But the awkwardness was most obvious in photographs, where I would invariably stand with one foot out to the side. They also found I ran a little oddly, even though I was active and loved playing outside.

Eventually an older aunt and my mother lay me down and actually measured my legs. By a couple of inches, one was shorter than the other. My mother took me to a well-known Bombay doctor, who confirmed the difference in the lengths and said that I must have had a mild attack of polio. (Polio was, of course, much more prevalent and frightening then than it is now.) To make up those inches, he said, I would have to wear a boot with a thick sole.

So I began wearing this heavy boot, and I was clearly unhappy with it. I couldn’t run around much anymore; instead, I stumbled here and there. My parents were dismayed, but then this is what the well-known doctor had recommended.

About then, the family moved to Aurangabad. Friends there suggested to my mother that she take me to a local doctor…

Do read on. It’s a heartwarming story.

The Odyssey Corner

Inside the projectionist’s booth

What does it take to put the movie on an Imax screen?

Lovely mini-essay in the Observer by Xavier Greenwood.

He works in darkness but everything he creates is light. Michael Ford, chief projectionist at the BFI Imax, struggles to name his favourite film, but he does have a favourite cinema. It was where he began his career in Southend-on-Sea. “I went to the guys knocking it down and asked if I could have a brick as a souvenir,” Ford says over the sound of a jet engine. “When the technology of Jurassic Park becomes reality, I can clone my cinema.”

That jet engine is not actually a jet engine. It is the sound of the Imax projector, a one-tonne hulk of grey machinery, which beams 5ft 7in of film per second on to a screen almost as tall as five London buses. A glass lens plate sucks a frame against the lens, holds it in place, lets it go, then moves on to the next frame. “When there is something wrong it will tell you,” Ford says. “You start hearing weird noises.”

The full print for The Odyssey, which was filmed entirely on Imax cameras, is 11 miles long and made up of 250,000 individual frames. It weighs as much as a small car. As I walk towards the projection booth at the BFI, I pass three silver flight cases with “PROPERTY OF IMAX” written on them. A few months ago, these cases carried three film reels from California to London, where they were checked and spliced together by the team. The BFI Imax is one of only 41 cinemas in the world able to show the film as it was shot.

I arrive in the booth midway through a screening…

My commonplace booklet

When my kids were small, this was one of their favourite books. (And indeed, one of mine, because we were a cat-loving family.) It’s about a cat who lived in a street who was welcome in every house in the neighbourhood, with predictable consequences.

And now what do I find but a story (£) in the weekend edition of the FT reporting that “rogue feeders are creating armies of Six-Dinner Sids, prompting felines to pile on the pounds — and some owners to take legal action.”

Hmmm…

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